Sustainable device assembly & secondary packaging: A growing focus for Pharma

While safety and compliance have long been pharma’s top priority, sustainability has recently become another important goal for drug developers and manufacturers. The industry now faces especially fast-growing pressure to reduce its environmental impact, including mandates like the Packaging & Plastic Waste Directive (PPWD) and European Green Deal (EGD).

While pharma organizations are already responding to these new targets in many ways, one particular link in the value chain is becoming an important new priority. Sustainable devices and packaging—combining prefilled primary containers with a delivery device and/or corresponding packaging components—is evolving from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

Pharma’s journey to sustainable packaging

By now, most drug developers have launched sustainability programs—from reducing waste, pollution, and water usage, to increasing the use of sustainable energy sources, to incentivizing suppliers to source and supply more sustainable goods.

The majority of drug developers have also adopted general policies or objectives related to packaging—though few of those goals have specifically focused on secondary packaging. As of today only minority of pharma companies have set specific, timebound objectives for this key component of their products. 

As a result, secondary packaging represents a significant, under-leveraged opportunity to reduce the environmental footprint of sterile injectables. Long-term, sustainable primary packaging may ultimately have a bigger impact—but only after navigating much higher restrictions on direct contact materials. In the near term, secondary packaging can drive some important sustainability wins. 

To unlock this opportunity, stakeholders across the industry will need to align on goals, incentives, and regulations that facilitate adoption of sustainable secondary packaging. Today, though, different levels of urgency are being felt at different points along the value chain.

Patients: Selective focus on sustainability

In “lifestyle” categories, healthcare consumers have long pushed for more environmentally friendly products and packaging. But when it comes to parenteral therapies, patients are typically more focused on the therapeutic success. Until recently, the industry has felt little user-driven pressure to adopt ecologically friendly formats for prescription products.

Regulators: Lingering uncertainty in many markets

Many regulatory authorities still do not specify targets for sustainable pharma packaging. Today, industry stakeholders who want to “green” their packaging often lack the compliance clarity they have with safety and quality—especially when it comes to material-intensive formats like autoinjectors and pens.

Industry: Top-down drive toward sustainability goals

While regulators work to align on new standards, industry stakeholders interested in sustainable packaging are forging ahead with solutions that align as closely as possible with current and predicted compliance requirements.

CDMOs are already beginning to see packaging-related sustainability KPIs in new requests, alongside familiar expectations for energy efficiency and emissions, pollution, and waste reduction. These new packaging requirements are then passed downstream to other vendors and suppliers, further extending pharma’s sustainability goals down the supply chain.

Together, all these stakeholders are steadily enabling the value chain to adopt more sustainable secondary packaging momentum. But while that’s a welcome trend, all these stakeholders will need to plan ahead for how this shift will impact manufacturing processes.

While sustainable packaging has great potential to reduce pharma’s ecological impact, implementing new solutions and materials will lead to numerous complexities that CDMOs and their customers should prepare for.

Contradicting priorities

In some cases, responding to market demand may not automatically support sustainability goals. For example, the shift to at-home and self-managed care is driving a surge in demand for autoinjector-based products—which typically require substantially more plastic than standard syringe-based products.

Cost-driving innovation in materials

New, more sustainable packaging materials may help the value chain balance sustainability goals and market demand— but such materials often come at a premium. Adding them to a product can also require sourcing and validating new suppliers, along with additional compliance and quality assurance steps.

New process & infrastructure needs

Ultimately, innovative new materials and formats must all be integrated into a product’s end-to-end manufacturing process. This complex step requires extensive early collaboration between drug developers and their CDMOs.

CDMOs themselves will need to prepare their infrastructure and resources to support this evolution in the value chain. That can mean making room for new and more sustainable materials, expanding their facilities to process more formats, and ensuring capacity for customers to prioritize sustainability in their packaging.

Seeing all these trends gather momentum, now is the time for service providers, material, equipment suppliers and drug developers to lay the groundwork for the next advances in sustainable packaging. Together, they can help the industry unlock an important new level of environmental responsibility.