Biopharmaceutical company reduces packaging carbon footprint by 61% through lifecycle assessment

A global biopharmaceutical company has taken a measured route towards lower-impact packaging, using life cycle assessment to identify where changes would deliver genuine environmental gains rather than just symbolic ones.

Working with its thermoform packaging supplier, the company mapped a complex system made up of multiple component sizes and used LCA to compare material and process options across the full product life cycle. That approach matters in healthcare packaging, wher...

e the environmental cost of raw materials, processing, transport, use and disposal can vary sharply depending on design choices. Recent academic studies in the pharmaceutical sector have made the same point, showing that life cycle assessment is increasingly being used to compare packaging materials, design options and end-of-life routes such as recycling and incineration.

The company’s aim was straightforward: cut the carbon footprint, reduce waste and increase circularity. Delivering that required a sequence of changes, each tested and measured before the next was introduced.

The first move was to improve material efficiency by adding regrind into the thermoforming process. Regrind is the trimmed scrap created during production, which can be ground down and fed back into extrusion. In healthcare packaging, where traceability and consistency are crucial, that is not always easy to do. But with suitable controls in place, the company introduced 25% and 50% regrind into two parts of the system after testing showed no meaningful drop in material performance. The result, according to the case study, was a reduction of 5.9 metric tonnes of material for every 1,000 parts across the packaging range.

Next came recycled content. The company incorporated 50% recycled material into one component, using the thermoformer’s ISCC PLUS certification to support traceability through the supply chain. In practice, that is designed to help verify that recycled feedstock is accounted for through the value chain under a mass-balance model. The change is expected to avoid 2.2 metric tonnes of virgin material for every 1,000 parts.

A further improvement focused on the decoration process. Hot stamping was replaced with laser etching, a change that reduced scrap and improved material efficiency again. It is a smaller intervention than changing the base material, but it shows how incremental process tweaks can contribute meaningfully when they are assessed systematically.

Once the changes were in place, the company used LCA to compare the packaging system before and after the redesign. The analysis showed an average 61% reduction in product carbon footprint across all sizes in the system. In total, the company says that the adjustments would avoid 19.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per 1,000 parts, a saving it equates to the annual emissions of several passenger cars or the carbon benefit of hundreds of urban trees.

The broader point is that sustainability improvements in pharmaceutical packaging increasingly depend on evidence rather than assumption. Industry guidance from groups such as the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council and the Association of Plastic Recyclers has helped shape design decisions, while academic work has underlined the importance of looking beyond a single material attribute and examining the whole system, including disposal and recovery pathways. For medical and biopharma packaging, where safety, performance and regulatory compliance cannot be compromised, that kind of analysis is especially important.

In this case, the company and its supplier used LCA not as a retrospective audit, but as a decision-making tool throughout the redesign process. That allowed them to prioritise changes with the largest effect on emissions, waste and virgin material use, while giving them a clearer basis for future packaging decisions.

Source: Noah Wire Services