Plastic Ingenuity, a specialist in custom thermoforming for multiple industries including healthcare, is optimising designs to use less plastic in packaging.
Jason Crosby, general manager, healthcare, Plastic Ingenuity said: “Sustainability is a big buzz right now; historically it hasn't been of interest for this market until around the last two years.
“The reason why it has taken so long to be incorporated into the healthcare game is because there's this balance of needing to be sustainable, but also needing to think about hygiene and patient safety.”
With regards to packaging sustainably, Crosby admits that it’s a little more challenging (and costly) as the company would need to use virgin-grade materials. This has resulted in Plastic Ingenuity working on optimising designs to use less plastic.
In some cases, the company has been able to look at how parts are used, how they run through automated equipment and change the density of the parts, meaning the packaging is smaller and twice as many parts can now fit on a truck (originally 200,000 and now 400,000), resulting in reduced emissions in the transportation process. In other cases, Plastic Ingenuity utilises its ISSC PLUS certification to enable the use of circular plastics from advanced recycling technologies.