Huhtamaki, a key global provider of sustainable packaging solutions, today announces a first-to-market sustainable innovation for the global pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. Huhtamaki's Push Tab® blister lid is mono-material PET and free from aluminum. It is designed to meet the stringent safety requirements of highly regulated pharmaceutical and healthcare packaging and provides the industry with a more sustainable alternative to traditional push-through blister packaging. This game changing innovation will help deliver sustainable packaging solutions for the growing global healthcare industry, whilst importantly maintaining functionality and efficiency, as Push Tab® blister lid runs on existing blister packaging lines without compromising on speed.
The Huhtamaki Push Tab® blister lid is made of mono-material PET (polyethylene terephthalate) which significantly improves recyclability of the packaging, whilst remaining compatible with existing high performance blister packaging lines, without needing modifications or extra investment. Huhtamaki and its partner – Klöckner Pentaplast – bring this first-to-market innovation to help the global healthcare and pharmaceutical sector meet their sustainability targets and achieve market growth at the same time. In 2021, European packaging sales in the healthcare category had an estimated value of EUR 1.4 billion, of which approximately 50% were in blister packaging.
“We are proud to partner with Klöckner Pentaplast to bring Push Tab® blister lid to market and continue to shape the sustainable future of pharmaceutical and flexible packaging. This innovation is designed as part of our blueloop platform, enabling us to speed up innovation and improve circularity in high-performance flexible packaging solutions. We are working hard to turn all our products into mono-material fully recyclable structures. In addition, we are collaborating with partners across the value chain to deliver innovation that helps ensure that ambitious sustainability targets around the globe can be met,” says Marco Hilty, President, Flexible Packaging at Huhtamaki.
“The pharmaceutical industry is proactively searching for sustainable packaging solutions that enable recyclability. Since blister packaging traditionally contains multiple materials, it is difficult to recycle them in a single recycling stream. Push Tab® blister lid solves this problem because it is made of mono PET. Push Tab® runs on existing blister packaging lines and is a plug-and-play solution, which means no additional investment is needed for our customers. This newly developed unique technology makes PET based lid film pushable and secures easy access to the tablet for the consumer,” says Tobias Fackler, Senior Manager of the Healthcare Business Unit at Huhtamaki Flexible Packaging.