Sustainability award
Pioneering sustainability with AstraZeneca – developing a single-material, recyclable pharmaceutical blister pack that balances patient safety with environmental responsibility.
Pharmaceutical packaging is one of the hardest sustainability challenges to crack: it must protect patient safety and meet stringent global regulations, but it’s traditionally made from multiple materials that are difficult to separate, so they end up incinerated or in landfill.
Through this transformational project, AstraZeneca, in partnership with Deloitte and Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP), set out to prove that you don’t have to choose between performance and circularity.
The goal was bold: to lead the market in moving towards fully recyclable blister packaging. Three requirements guided the work: recyclability, barrier performance and ease of manufacture.
Determined to pioneer a new standard, AZ have identified a suitable single-material blister pack, which is soon to be launched. However, for products sensitive to moisture additional overwraps may be required, but these are currently unrecyclable, so the team are actively searching for alternatives.
This project brought together experts from engineering, design, sustainability and strategy to integrate environmental goals while improving manufacturing performance. One of the reasons why Deloitte won this project, and continues to work with AstraZeneca on this, is that we are able to provide a one-stop-shop and assess all of the criteria required.
Working with our partner CDP, we gave AstraZeneca end to end support across the whole packaging challenge, from understanding regulations and real world recyclability through to lab testing and modelling materials.
All this has enabled AstraZeneca to make confident decisions across its packaging portfolio and lay the foundations for sustainable impact on a global scale.
View the profile in the MCA Members Directory.