The CiPPPA webinar, held on 16th May 2024, was a pivotal event for professionals in the pharmaceutical industry and those interested in sustainable packaging initiatives. The webinar shed light on the challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry and the launch of CiPPPA. Watch the video here or read the transcription below:
The webinar was hosted and moderated by Maryam Babba, Ph.D., TDi’s Multi-stakeholder Manager and Lead Project Manager for CiPPPA. Joining her as guest speakers were industry experts:
– Michele Langford, Environmental Sustainability Engineering Lead at Merck
– Harriet Lewis, Director for Market Access and Public Affairs at Chiesi
– Joseph Muscat, Environmental Stewardship and Innovation Senior Director at Haleon
– Sarah Coles, Associate Director for Industry Engagement at Lilly
– Ryan Stolzenbach, Global Packaging Sustainability Program Manager at AbbVie
Maryam Babba
Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Maryam Babba, and I’m the product manager for CiPPPA. I also work for TDi Sustainability, the Project Management Office for CiPPPA. So firstly CiPPPA stands for Circularity in Primary Pharmaceutical Packaging Accelerator. I know it’s a bit of a mouthful. Still, it’s a not-for-profit healthcare sector-wide initiative with a mission to enable companies and the general public to recycle primary pharmaceutical packaging as well as the public to recycle packaging. So, today we will introduce the agenda and ologies to you. Okay, so I’ll explain to you how CiPPPA came about and exactly what we aim to achieve shortly. So this is sort of a brief introduction about CiPPPA, followed by a panel session and a Q&A session. I’m delighted to be joined today by representatives of CiPPPA. These are our founding members and the steering committee, and you can see the details on the screen. I’ll introduce them fully in a little bit. So, thank you very much to all of our speakers for joining us today. So, for the audience that has joined us, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to send your questions for us to answer at the end of the session, but please keep sending your questions so we can compile them and make sure we address them towards the end. So, I’ll give you a little bit of a background about Supa and how it came about, and we will talk to you about the structure, what we hope to achieve as CiPPPA, and why it was created. It’s a very new initiative. It emerged from a collaborative effort within the pharmaceutical industry. So, TDi sustainability was approached by a group of pharmaceutical companies that recognised the need to address packaging and circularity issues and challenges that they currently face. So, they wanted to establish a platform for discussions and tangible actions. I know there are a lot of initiatives or platforms where they’re talking workshops and where there are a lot of discussions ongoing, but the idea of CiPPPA is slightly different, and we want it to be an action platform. So, the idea was conceived by CiPPPA during a conversation at a trade event, which spurred the need to address pre-competitive challenges in the industry. Our chair at CIPPPA is not here with us today, but he often likes to say that, you know, the industry is not competing for packaging but rather for medicines. So, if we can come together as an industry, there’s a lot we can achieve. So we’re going to explain here what it means when we say it’s pre-competitive and what it refers to during the cut when we talk about the collaboration between otherwise competing companies. So I think there’s a great deal to talk about, especially when we have what two years, even competitors within the industry, talking about and spearheading these changes that we see. So these competing companies, otherwise competing companies, want to address these challenges, shared challenges, and shared goals. So, the initiative itself was championed by a regulatory agency director who spearheaded this effort, came up with the word, and coined the same idea. And you know, other industry members have joined efforts together to bring it to fruition. CIPPPA has then expanded and included stakeholders across the primary pharmaceutical value chain, so when we talk about our short-term goals, long-term goals and medium goals, we like to separate it into, I mean timelines and what we aim to achieve. So, as we said, CiPPPA is trying to tackle the challenges that we have within the pharmaceutical packaging circularity issues that we have. So, we want to look at it from a short-term perspective first, and we will talk about how we can identify and map the issues that we have an ongoing lack of infrastructure to support circularity within the industry. There’s also a need for us to coordinate efforts and to improve the already existing recycling scheme. There are so many ongoing schemes, but most of these efforts are ongoing in silos. So, you know, the idea of CiPPPA is to collaborate as an industry, and efforts that are currently siloed within the industries can be expanded. We can scale them nationwide, and we can all learn from them as well. There’s also a shared financial implication associated with running schemes. So the idea is if we can make it more sustainable, more sustainable practice, it’s also navigating complicated regulatory landscapes that restrict the use current use of waste materials in primary pharmaceutical and manufacturing. These are to mention a few of our short-term goals, and we have more ambitious circularity goals as well. So these are some of our slides, and hopefully we can, we can share them with some of you later on. So what we’re doing is CIPPPA is trying to unite forces with diverse membership categories across the value chain. So, as an initiative, we, as TDi, work together with a group of pharmaceutical organisations that recognise this need to want to challenge the current, the current issues that we have, so they established a platform for discussion and for tangible acts actions. So, like we said, it’s a pretty competitive space. Just to explain what we aim to achieve, we want to talk about our the membership categories that we have within CiPPPA. So, we have the steering committee, the Alliance members, and our technical advisory model. So, this is sort of a governance structure that drives effective collaboration. The steering committee comprises industry leaders who guide CiPPPA’s strategic directions and oversee our current task forces. So we have three task forces, which we’ll also talk about later on. So, all the members that join CIPPPA will join as Alliance members, and they need to participate in their chosen task forces based on their interests and expertise. The last category that we have is the technical advisory group, which consists of the lives of the NHS, the community pharmacy, England, regulatory organisations, knowledge partners, and so on. They help provide expertise, advice, and guidance to inform CiPPPAs’ activities and also I’d also the task force, so moving on to the task forces at CiPPPA, we have three Action Task Forces which look at specific packaging types, the blister packs, the inhalers and injectables. So, with most of the people that we talk about, all the members of the public, we all have some of these packages, and you know, sometimes we were not even sure what to do with them. So when we talk about the task force, members represent a diverse range of stakeholders across not just pharmaceutical organisations but non-pharmaceutical entities, regulatory advisories and so on. So these task forces are focused on overcoming the current challenges that we have not just related to recycling but also the complex raw materials and designs of perhaps blisters that hinder recyclability, which makes it very difficult and not as easy as we would have wanted. We also need to improve the recycling schemes and infrastructure that we currently have. We also have the injectable Task Force, which is looking at challenges similar to the blister packs but also at financial implications, other regulatory complexities, recyclability of injectable packaging, and so on. We also have the last task force, which is the Inhaler task force, which also addresses similar challenges as the other two but also considers the feasibility of schemes, the maturity of schemes, scalability as keen as already ongoing schemes that we have and how we can roll them out nationwide. So, all of these task forces are working together to coordinate efforts and advocate for consumer education to develop and promote sustainable practices and drive behaviour change.
So, moving forward, we will talk about who we have on the panel, and I’ll introduce them to you. So first, we have Michele Langford. Michele is an environmental sustainability engineer who is also lead at Merck, and she has more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, which spans operational supply chains. Michele has a degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto and has worked extensively across Europe and North America. Today, we also have Harriet Lewis, who is a director of public affairs and communication at Chiesi, UK, and Ireland. Harriet studied Pharmacy at the University of Manchester and has a diploma in public health. And Harriet has practised as an NHS pharmacist for over 18 years. Thank you very much for joining us today. And we have Joseph Muscat, who is a senior director of environmental stewardship and innovation science at Haleon. Joe has a PhD in chemistry from the University of Manchester, and since joining Haleon in 2021, he has worked to develop and implement Haleon’s packaging sustainability strategy. We also have Sarah Coles, who is an associate director from industry engagement at Eli Lilly. Sarah is a chartered accountant by training and now has more than 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. So she has gained her degree in economics from the University of Bristol as well as a certificate in health economics from the University of Aberdeen. Thank you for joining us. And lastly, we have Ryan Stolzenbach, who is the global packaging sustainability programme manager at AbbVie, so Ryan is joining us from America. So, thank you for joining us. It must be very early in the morning. Ryan holds a degree in packaging sciences from Michigan State University and has split his career between the consumer goods and biopharmaceutical industry, designing packages for everything from pencils to hand tools and air fresheners to medicines and medical devices. So welcome, everyone. And thank you very much for joining us today.
So, first of all, I’d like to touch a little bit more on the rationale behind CiPPPA and address this question to Harriet as Chiesi is one of our founding members of CiPPPA, so if you can speak a little bit about what motivates the initiation of CIPPPA and why you wanted to be a part of CiPPPA and also your vision for the future.
Harriet Lewis
Thanks very much, Maryam. So yes, hello, everybody, and welcome to this webinar. Very excited to be launching CiPPPA. We’ve been working on this in the background for some time now. So what’s the background to all of this from Chiesi perspective is that we were making hailers, of which there are served over 17 million or so not, not all of ours but of lots of other companies 17 million inhaler devices that are prescribed in the UK every year. Some of those encounters contain a talent which has a high global warming potential. So, it has an impact on the environment. Not only is there a talent in there, there’s also plastic resources, and we’re very controlled and painless. And have an impact on an environment when patients no longer know they will use them. So we did a survey of patients years ago. What are they doing with their inhalers when they don’t need them anymore? The majority of people either take them back to their Pharmacy or put them in their domestic refuse. And that’s really not where we want them to be. We want them to be responsibly removed from the environment. So we set up our own scheme. We did a feasibility study to understand what would be the best thing for patients to immobilise, empower them, and get the best possible return, as well as not the actual financial return volumes and understanding of the inhaler devices. What we found out from patients was that they wanted this to be really cynical. They don’t want to be messed around. They don’t want to be sent from pillar to post. They want to be really, really simple. So that’s what we did on Saturday. We did the feasibility study and published the results. We’re also aware of lots of other companies who’ve done very similar things. And it became very, very apparent quite quickly that we need to work together on this. This is really where sort of financing that actually we are greater than the sum of our parts cannot possibly be easier can’t deliver this on a scale on our own. We need to work with all our stakeholders. We need to work with the other companies involved in this, including the other companies in the value chain, as well as with our patients. And as well as everybody because we often buy and never because predominantly it’s about changing the patients who hate changing people’s behaviour. And actually, we can’t do that on our own, I have. So I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve got a launch setback. Pac was supportive of the initiative, its principles, and the spirit of this non-competitive consultant.
Maryam Babba
Thank you very much, Harriet. And I think that’s absolutely right. You know, nobody can do it alone. So, there are so many amazing schemes out there. Would anyone else like to touch on their reasons for joining CiPPPA?
Sarah Coles
Alright, Maryam. Yeah, I just would like to echo what exactly Harriet said. I think this is a very complex issue. We all have a shared goal to break down the barriers that we see as an industry, and we have a responsibility to deal with our medicines responsibly for the environment.
Absolutely. Thank you very much. Anyone else? Or should we move on to the next question? Okay, thank you very much. So thank you, Harriet and Sarah. And it’s clear from your answers. That collaboration is actually the driving motivation for you personally and also for other organisations and getting involved in the setup. So thank you. So, I’ll move the next question to Michele. Michele, if you can, please tell us a little bit about why CiPPPA was needed in the first place. Some of the challenges about primary pharmaceutical packaging and why this collaboration is highlighted by the centre and Harriet. Why is it so important to solve these challenges?
Michele Langford
Yes, thank you, Maryam. So why is it important to have CiPPPA in the first place? I think Sarah said it already. We have a responsibility. So, like all manufacturers of packaged products, manufacturers of pharmaceutical products also strive to deliver product packaging that is as environmentally neutral as possible and as sustainable as possible. However, it also has an obligation to ensure that packaging protects the integrity of the medication. So, it’s a rather fine balance that one needs to strike. We also see that those obligations around managing sustainable packaging are becoming more and more obligatory with regulations that are coming into force. So the recent or the upcoming, I should say, packaging and packaging waste regulation in the EU is just one example. So this basically underlines that also as an industry in terms of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at pharmaceutical primary packaging, we absolutely have to address environmental sustainability. In addition, the pharmaceutical industry does have a few unique challenges compared to other industries in terms of packaging. Firstly, we operate in a very regulated environment. So, any changes that we make to our products are typically long; they’re typically costly. We need to demonstrate good stability and protective results. Of that packaging for our products. Secondly, the medications themselves require high-integrity packaging, so it’s not easy for us to find suitable alternatives to packaging that’s out there. And then finally, I would say the third element is that the quantity of packaging and the quantity of the products themselves are low in comparison to some other industries. If we think of the food industry, for instance, the beauty industry, the volumes of packaging are relatively low. So you combine these three different elements together, and it does make packaging recycling schemes more difficult to find funding for them to actually be successful. So, CIPPPA really helps us combine our forces. Right now, right we can combine the quantities, and we can combine our resources together. Then, we would create a more favourable environment for recycling schemes, as Harriet has described. At the same time, we can build industry momentum by discovering or investigating other sustainable primary packaging solutions. So, there are really two elements of recycling: improved recycling schemes and alternatives.
Maryam Babba
Absolutely, thank you. Very much, Michele. Joe, would you like to add?
Joseph Muscat
Yes, I mean, just to build on Michele’s point, I think, in addition to helping to kind of inform direction on travel regulations and making sure that we are ahead of emerging changes. A substantial proportion of medical products actually are in the non-prescription space. They are what we call over-the-counter medicines, where people can choose how to buy them and which products to buy. In that sort of context, consumer choice and consumer attitudes to sustainability have started to become important. Increasingly, we’ve seen evidence that consumers are selecting products based on sustainability. 57% of consumers will look more favourably at a brand making a sustainable choice versus one that isn’t, and that translates to significantly greater growth. Brands are making sustainability claims about twice the growth, so not only is it good for the planet, but it’s also good for business.
Maryam Babba
Oh, it’s really interesting that consumers are making those sorts of choices. Thank you very much, Michele and Joe. So, the environmental impact is highly regulated. It’s a neat, regulated nature of the environment and operation. And I think consumer expectations provide some sort of clarity around complex issues that are very specific to the sector. Sarah, perhaps I could bring you in here. How do you think his goals and ambitions align with the industry-wide initiatives? The NHS has net zero, and Eli Lilly is actually on goals and ambitions.
Sarah Coles
Thanks Maryam. Lilly has set ambitious environmental goals globally. We aim to be carbon neutral by 2030. And in our own UK operations, we are aligned with the NHS goals to be net zero by 2050. To enable this, we’re committed to reducing our environmental footprint across the lifecycle of our products, and finding a solution to reducing the carbon footprint at the end of the lifecycle of our products is part of that transition plan. By working with CiPPPA, we hope we can we can work together to achieve this. Our efforts within CIPPPA will focus on the injectables task force, together with our partners in the space, and we’re also steering group members to continue to have oversight of the governance and progress in the other task forces which were not directly involved.
Maryam Babba
Absolutely, you’ve highlighted how you hope CIPPPA can help both Eli Lilly and also help with an industry-wide sort of carbon reduction. Thank you very much. Joe, back to you. How would you assess the current status of circularity in primary pharmaceutical packaging? And how do you hope CiPPPAs efforts might impact this particularly thinking about
blister packs which I know you have a specific interest in?
Joseph Muscat
Yeah, I mean, look, that’s a good question. I think it’s fair to say that the healthcare sector has been a lot more serious and a lot more engaged in this activity. I think if we take a step back and look at the first job of vanguard in terms of packaging, it started with foods and moved on to cosmetics. They were the most visible categories. In consumers’ minds, they actually generated the most packaging and packaging methods, according to Michele’s point earlier. Our products across the healthcare industry tend to be very material efficient. So we’re playing catch up, but I think we are starting to bring the right elements together to start to build industry coalitions, identify common goals, start to build common approaches and then start to actually drive system-wide change and change which relies on us being able to engage our players in the waste management ecosystem, that guys that handle the waste the regulator’s that decide what can and can’t be recycled and so on.
Maryam Babba
Absolutely, I’m playing catch up, and hopefully, we’ll do some more impactful work. We’ve talked about the wider industry challenges a little bit. So now, I am thinking specifically about recycling, which is one of our short-term goals. I’ll address this question to Ryan. So Ryan, could you please explain some of the key challenges that the wider industry has encountered? When trying to implement recycling and circularity for primary pharmaceutical packaging, How do you think CIPPPA as an initiative can help solve some of these challenges?
Ryan Stolzenbach
So, in a broad sense, they see two main challenges to primary pharmaceutical packaging, and the first one is really design. Functionally, pharma packaging is typically a very efficient solution to meet any number of the requirements that we must meet to put a safe and effective product on the market. The current designs, however, are both dimensionally in their profile with the materials and construction; they don’t really lend themselves to recycling or any other circular end-of-life scenario, right? They simply aren’t designed for those systems. So that’s a really serious challenge that we have to work to overcome and create unique systems in order to deal with these types of packaging. As was mentioned earlier, in a lot of cases, there are better alternatives, yet not that we aren’t looking for them, but that they are being researched and investigated and tested all the time. But they’re not on the market yet. We have to do things that can meet some of these regulations and some of the goals that we have today, which is one of the reasons for CIPPPA being an accelerator and action platform. The second challenge really is with waste handling, you know, it’s not the second one, right? But first, how do the end users identify how to deal with that packaging and those materials? A lack of harmonisation across industries isn’t exactly hopefully why this material is recyclable and put into my curbside. Well, if I lived in this town, then yes, but if I lived in that town, then no. What happens if there are medications still left in it? What are these things? How can I deal with this? And then, once it is even disposed of properly, how do we ensure that that is effectively diverted from landfills into more positive end-of-life scenarios and becomes feedstock for the next generation of materials right. So those are the two big challenges that I see. I think that CIPPPA as an entity is really well positioned right now with partners from every step of the supply chain and government to develop real actionable approaches to some of these very challenging and very real issues that we’re having.
Maryam Babba
I’ll try to avoid using the term recycled. Joe, is there anything you’d like to add to that?
Joseph Muscat
I think Ryan captured the key points really, really well. I mean, the challenge we have is also around regulatory ambiguity because, as I mentioned earlier, and even since this is a topic that’s new to the healthcare sector, we’re regulations around what’s permitted to be collected, sorted and recycled across various channels is unclear or ambiguous. So, there is a challenge around clarifying what we can and can’t do. Again, Ryan alluded to the circular element. There is a challenge around having clarity in terms of to what extent we can incorporate recycled content in our packaging. There’s a change around understanding how to qualify the material so that it’s safe and doesn’t compromise product efficacy. But there’s also a challenge regarding the regulatory side of permitting the use of those materials once we’ve demonstrated that they’re safe. So, our case needs clarification to accelerate action.
Maryam Babba
Absolutely. There’s a lot to learn from other industries, and we also have to play catch up. So, moving on, I think we’ll ask questions about your ongoing efforts. Perhaps I’ll ask Michele if you can talk to us about any ongoing efforts that you’ve been involved with so far to promote circularity within this sector and how these projects have progressed so far.
Michele Langford
Yeah, so Merck Healthcare, we’ve had a number of projects ongoing to promote circularity of packaging, I’m going to say, upstream from the consumer or the patient. So that’s to say we’ve got a number of projects together with suppliers when it comes to packaging from our suppliers or even within our industrial sites. Or manufacturing sites. If we have shipments between sites or storage of semi-finished products, we’ve been able to really reuse a lot of this packaging, and we’ve had some good results. There, the focus of CiPPPA, which is the post-consumer circularity of pharmaceutical primary packaging, that is required requires much stronger collaboration. Right. So, this is the theme that we’ve been talking about since the beginning of this webinar, and it requires stronger collaboration. In comparison with industrial waste, right post-industrial waste or post-industrial recycling is something we can perform more easily because the quantities will have come out of a single factory, and it will be in a guaranteed state, and we really have control over the quality of the waste much different from a post-consumer environment. Merck is, however, a member of an injector pin takeback programme in Denmark. The experience that we have there shows that there is absolutely genuine interest from patients in taking part in such schemes. So we’ve seen takeback rates of about 20 to 25% on injector pins, which I think actually was higher than what we expected. It hasn’t been going on for that long. It exceeded our expectations, and the intention is also to continue and progress this further. So y, you know, there’s a lot of appetite for this. I think it was mentioned by Joe as well that this is becoming requested by consumers. And we do see that when there are opportunities to take part. There’s definitely an interest in the public.
Maryam Babba
Thank you very much, Michele, and thank you. So I’ll ask Harriet the next question. We’ve heard from Michele about specific schemes that exist and what they’ve made. You know, we have to play catch up. Thinking in terms of any sort of specific success stories or lessons learned from the early stages of Harriet, what do you think or what do you see as the next steps?
Harriet Lewis
Yeah, so I think from an early start, we realised that there was a great spirit and appetite to make this work. One of the challenges from scratch is that you have moments about contracts and working agreements and things like that, but I think they probably are, so the nature of the beast of consortia, especially pre-competitive consortia. There was some of that, so we weren’t slow to get started in that respect. But I think there’s the spirit of the camaraderie that we’ve had and the willingness to make this work. Absolutely, you know, tremendously in, you know, we should really sort of pat ourselves on the back for that one. I think the other success is that aid has encouraged the participation of non-farmer organisations as well. So, right across the whole value chain. We’ve had technical expertise from regulators, the NHS, pharmacies, and possibly part of it from the inhalers’ perspective. We could be very well pumped about our solution. And I just know that we’ve got that technical expertise to bring to our team as we start to develop our solutions. The clue is in the name; it’s an accelerator, and therefore, we need to get going when you start demonstrating some sort of starting point. We’ve, we’ve been talking now, and we need to get on and start doing something that’s the message now is let’s just use it for what this is, which is an accelerator programme, and start to develop solutions that we can then build on over time, but the ultimate goal being that we create a network of organisations and stakeholders that can help us to shape the future of our packaging.
Maryam Babba
Thank you very much, Harriet, for that. And I think it’s quite clear that CiPPPA has a lot to do moving forward. So, if I could ask Sarah the next question, please, what are some of the specific obstacles that other industry initiatives have faced, and how do you think we can overcome them? How can CiPPPA learn from some of these lessons?
Sarah Coles
I think we’ve been talking throughout the webinar about how this is a pre-competitive space, and it takes a different mindset. When you’re working with people who are normally your competitors, now Lily, alongside Merck, healthcare, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, has been involved in a cross-industry collaboration in Denmark, working on the recycling of used injection pens, so I’ll talk a little bit about our experience here, which echoes a lot of what Harriet’s just talked about. We learned from that that the involvement of multiple companies means complex project management, and that’s to say, agreeing on legal frameworks ensuring compliance with the codes of practice in particular countries and with competition takes considerable time and effort from companies. It does take a lot of resources, both financial and time, from employees to set up and manage projects like this. So, one of the things I learned from this was to use a third-party project manager, which is why it’s great that we’ve been using TDi to help us on this journey. But on the flip side of all the obstacles, you know, we are committed to working in collaboration to bring together enhanced problem-solving, leveraging the skills and expertise across our industry and with our industry partners, and learning from those various perspectives in this space. The hope really is that we bring forward scalable, cost-effective, replicable solutions that are simple and straightforward for the users of our medicines so that we can see good take-up rates from these programmes.
Maryam Babba
And I think it all comes back to collaboration. And so maybe I can bring Joe into this. Are there some projects already underway that you hope CiPPPA will be able to advance further? And what might some of these outcomes be?
Joseph Muscat
It’s almost like a jigsaw puzzle. Many, many companies are working on different parts of the puzzle. So, for example, yeah, so So Haley on, we’ve been actively involved with organisations like the sustainable medicines partnership and the GSEs together with a number of other significant OTC companies are there, and you know, we see the likes of the Sustainable medicines partnership and looking at the regulatory position. We see organisations under the Global Self-Care Federation and convenience companies together co-funding trials with recycling to understand the challenges associated with the best recycling. So, I kind of see Sephora as a way of bringing all of our stuff together in one place and then looking at how we can take the different learnings and turn that into action and accelerate what would happen ordinarily. I don’t want a much lower timescale. Let’s see if we can bring that forward onto a timescale of months instead of years or decades.
Maryam Babba
I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. And I think that’s how it works without having to replicate efforts, and I think that’s really what we need to do. We can take what we learn and, you know, work together as a collective and collaborative partner. I think it’s very clear that there are a lot of areas where we can really capitalise on collaboration. And that’s a core point of CiPPPA. And I think it’s really one of the key strengths that we have as an entity. So Ryan, is there any specific call to action or invitation that you can extend to others for involvement that you’d like to extend to the audience particularly?
Ryan Stolzenbach
Yeah, just very briefly and very succinctly get involved. At any level you’re comfortable with, just jump into the conversation. Get yourselves involved. We can affect change by sitting on the sidelines and accepting things as they come right, whether that’s with an organisation like CIPPPA that fits your goals, another programme that aligns more closely with those goals that you may have, or with markets that you might be a part of. And the other thing, right, is if you’re worried about not having enough expertise, you don’t have enough knowledge, and you don’t think you’ll be able to bring anything of value to the table. Don’t be right. People like us people in the field, at least anybody working in sustainability that I’ve really ever met? We’re a passionate bunch. And we absolutely relish the opportunity to sit down, talk with anybody, share what we’ve learned and what we know, and bring as many people as we can effectively into the fold to push the conversation forward. So get involved.
Maryam Babba
So, on that note, I think it’s time for us to move to the question-and-answer session. So, thank you very much to everyone who has taken part in the panel session. And thank you also to our audiences and the members for submitting questions. I think we’ve now got a bit of time to go through some of the questions. Even though my screen stayed up a little bit, I’ll try to go through the questions I can see, and then I’ll address them to people in the panel to answer them. And I think we’ve already had some questions that have been already answered by the panel. So they’re responding to it on the chat there. Thank you very much for that. So, I think we’re going to start with one of the first questions here, and I will address it with Joe. Please talk to us about any experiences from other industries that we can learn from.
Joseph Muscat
We learned about statistics, and consumer-facing businesses have been gaining interest. I think there is learning here now about how we make OTC drugs, but we also make a lot of toothpaste. Here’s one of our products. Now, toothpaste tubes historically have not been recyclable. They’ve been complex materials and packaging, but it’s been very difficult to sort and recycle. Well, as an industry, we work together with Colgate and the PNGs, Unilever and developed common design approaches to be able to effectively go to modern material tubes that can be recycled, and we’ve gone as far as to partner up with Colgate and run recycling pilots in places like the US where to go about we’ve got cold branded materials that are going out to households talking about how tubes are now designed for recycling and how they can actually be put into household refuse and be recycled along with everything else. So, if the collaboration theme is key here and what we are learning from the consumer goods businesses, sometimes you may need to work with your toughest competitor to be able to drive change.
Maryam Babba
Harriet, can you address the challenges presented by pharmaceutical waste and biological matter contamination, and used devices and CiPPPA’s thinking about how to address this?
Harriet Lewis
So we have three main work streams at the moment. Those work streams are inhalers, injector pens, and also blister packs. As we gain momentum and start to develop those solutions, we will need to tackle some of these much more complex ones. We need to get started. As we get started, we have to build the credibility of CiPPPA so that we can start to have some of those more complex discussions with us, specifically with the regulators. So, I’m no expert on packaging, and I will probably defer to my packet and my expert colleagues on this.
Michele Langford
In terms of hazardous materials? I think a lot of it is in how the materials are collected. So, it’s really about ensuring that the system for collecting materials or waste waste packaging is robust. The sorting that takes place at the recycling centre is also equally robust and in compliance with the necessary environmental ISO standards. We do see examples already in the industry. I mean, I wouldn’t call out the secret system in Spain, where they are handling pharmaceutical waste packaging in dedicated sorting centres, so this could be an example of a lot going forward.
Joseph Muscat
I will build on the points that you’ve made me show and save. I think one of the things we need to be aware of is not every solution can be applied to every type of packaging. So, we talked about some other formats. Blisters, injectables, and inhalers were one solution that may be applicable to one type of pharmaceutical packaging but may not necessarily be applicable to others. So it’s looking at the type of format, understanding what types of products to dispense from, and then looking at the risks associated with which will then determine how that’s handled, whether it’s a curbside solution or a tape app or some other scheme. So it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all.
Maryam Babba
Thank you very much for your contributions, Harriet and Michele, and for your job. There’s another question about legislation: How does the current legislation fit in? How is it helping or hindering CIPPPA and recycling processes?
Michele Langford
Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I think there are both depending on the legislation, right? So you can look at environmental legislation that is coming through and promoting circularity. And I would say, on the one hand, almost punishing non-circular practices and promoting circular practices through EPR type, extended producer responsibility, fees and taxes, these kinds of things. So those are certainly working in our favour, right? So, if we can indicate that certain product packaging is being recycled we c, we could reduce fees on that packaging; that would help now; on the other hand, there was an interesting question as well in the Q&A regarding context-sensitive packaging, clearly when it comes to health authority regulations. They’re primarily looking at protecting the health, which is, of course, the right thing to do for the patient. And therefore, the burden of demonstrating that the product packaging is, you know, performing its primary duty of protecting the product until it gets to the patient and probably also easing administration at the patient side, there’s a role of packaging perhaps in that area as well. They’re not going to be too bending. But, you know, I think we do need to open up some of those discussions about what, what could be pathways that would be, you know, more or less barrier-free and what pathways are going to be quite complex and have those discussions with the health authorities as well. So I think in some cases, it’s not a simple answer, but some of the regulations definitely help because they’re pushing in this way. And then and then some of them when it comes to pharmaceutical products, you know, we have a pretty strong burden to demonstrate the safety of the product.
Maryam Babba
We’ve got another question: I am a pharmacy technician working in a community pharmacy. Is there anything I can do to drive sustainability?
Harriet Lewis
There is plenty you can do so that sustainability goes right across the whole patient journey. It isn’t just about the packaging. It is about the patient and how they use their medications; it doesn’t matter what the medication is. The best, the most sort of environmentally friendly medication is the one that is taken correctly and effectively, and patients get the best possible outcomes from it. So, going right back to the beginning, does the patient know how to use their medicine? Are they using it correctly? They’re not reordering more than they need to say, managing the waste right up front from the very beginning of the patient journey and what they do. With it when they no longer need it? So don’t put it in the kitchen; that’s the worst place for it. Actually, bring it back to the Pharmacy, encourage people to come back, bring it back to the Pharmacy, and if you get some backloads of stuff, back loads of inhalers as when I used to be in practice, we used to see back loads of inhalers. It’s worth asking the question, why is there about why people should bag loads of inhalers? Is it because the patient has been just reordering it continuously? Or is it because they’ve not been using it properly? So there is so much you can do. I personally believe community pharmacy is absolutely critical.
Maryam Babba
On the back of that, maybe you could answer the question about the returns key and the potential of curbside waste. How would you deposit return schemes and curbside waste?
Harriet Lewis
Ultimately, I think if we have it on my wish list, all medicines would be returned easily, simply in the same way, but their domestic waste would be returned curbside. We are a long way off because there are five states of regulation that we need to get through, as well as the behaviour change because we would need some form of education from the public to sort their waste. We’ve done really well with domestic waste and encouraging the public to say, but we need to do quite a bit further in order to prevent any harm to the public. So it’s somewhere in the distance. But in the meantime, we just need to encourage the public to treat their medicines differently. Medicines shouldn’t just be thrown away. Medicine should be treated in a way that is well-respected by taking them to the place or doing something with them. That is the most sensible and responsible way of disposing of them. But yes, ultimately curbside, but we’re away off. Please, whoever you are going to join us, Come with us on this journey.
Maryam Babba
Sarah, how do you motivate people to take part in schemes to recycle primary pharmaceutical packaging?
Sarah Coles
Great question. And I think first and foremost is simplicity. Good communication right from the person who will put that medicine into the appropriate place becomes the solution. The person who hands over that medicine to the patient or the person handing over an over-the-counter medicine to the patient understands how that should be disposed of and can communicate it at that level. So, I think what we are all aiming for is a solution that is simple and straightforward. Everybody involved in that communication line needs to be able to drive awareness of that solution when we have it.
Maryam Babba
To all speakers, could you please give any examples or some achievements that are already evident from the end users patient’s perspective?
Harriet Lewis
For inhalers, we ran a survey of patients to gather patient feedback. I’m sure the other schemes have run surveys and patient feedback as well. But the feedback was that we ran a postal scheme, we tested the postal scheme, and the feedback was phenomenal. There wasn’t a single dissenting voice from the public; they loved it, and they wanted more of it. So, the public wants to do this. They really do.
Joseph Muscat
Have a second I mean, you know we we were participated in a blessed to take back scheme a couple of years ago, and we saw a large amount of support from consumers who wanted to find a place to be able to recycle their business. The challenge of we’ve gotten this is why CiPPPA is here for his how do we accelerate those skills and make them scale? Bigger and faster?
There’s another question here: Will CiPPPA look at other packaging materials are extra different than retail support. There’s no better person to answer this than the steering committee; they make the decisions. So will CiPPPA look at other packaging materials as extra to the three task forces and look at good practices in the pharma industry?
Michele Langford
At the moment, three types of materials have been pointed out as a starting element here. But it is early days, and I would say that the intent is certainly to broaden this geographically. There were a number of questions about, you know, where this working geographically focuses the UK at the moment, but potentially looking at other types of pharmaceutical primary packaging, but at the moment, that’s that’s not what we’re doing right. We’re sticking to these three. I think the idea is that we want to probably get those. Understand those three elements first, and then those three packaging types first, before going ahead. You know, but clearly looking at other other good examples across different industries. Absolutely. Definitely. There’s no question we wouldn’t want to. This is definitely a space for sharing upcoming packaging legislation and updates and how we’re preparing for new legislation. I think new legislation should be a big guide in what we focus on, right? So if legislation says packaging has to be recyclable, then you know, we have to ask ourselves, what does that mean, right? Recyclable means a minimum of 70% or 80% of the material is actually recovered and can be reused, and that is high-quality recycling, not necessarily downside killing. Then, that will definitely shape the types of technologies that we look at and the types of solutions that we need to look at. So, it absolutely has to listen to what the real legislation is and also be an opportunity to have a dialogue about where we think we can do things effectively.
Maryam Babba
Last question is talking about whether community pharmacies are planned collection points like the key in the inhaler. How are you planning to ensure that pharmacies aren’t overwhelmed with many different streams of product to collect?
Harriet Lewis
That’s a really good point. We are very conscious that we don’t want to overwhelm them; we don’t want to add any administrative burden or anything that’s going to disrupt the excellent work that community pharmacies provide to the public. How are we going to do it? We’re going to work with the stakeholders. That’s how we’re going to. We need to hear from people like yourself who just ask the question, and also through the network and bodies, the community pharmacies for England and Wales, Scotland, etc., and all those organisations, so we need to work together. And I think we’ve been we’ve been sort of saying this most of the way through this webinar. We can’t do this on our own because we run the risk of creating something that doesn’t work for other parts of the pathway at the solution.
Maryam Babba
So I think it’s quite clear from all the discussion that we’ve heard today that CiPPPA needs to be sustainable, circular, and environmentally responsible, and we need to foster this collaboration and innovation, and we aim to achieve that as an industry and transform this industry into a global leader in sustainability. So thank you very much. And, lastly, would say join us in our mission to drive positive change in primary pharmaceutical packaging. So please contribute your insight and expertise by participating in our task forces, which are focused on blister packs, inhalers, and injectables to help us navigate regulatory landscapes and promote policies that support circulatory and sustainability. And as individuals have seen a question about an individual. We want to actively engage in recycling efforts and directly contribute towards CiPPPA as a mission. So, over the long term, we’ll provide updates on the schemes that are established as part of CiPPPA, our LinkedIn channel, and our website.
Together, we can create a circular economy for pharmaceutical packaging that benefits not just the industry but the whole planet. So join CiPPPA today and be a part of the solution. So please get in touch with us by email, through the website, or through LinkedIn with any questions, comments, or stories you’d like to share. Thank you very much to everybody, the audience that has joined us today, and the panellists who have taken time out to join us today.