The Guardlid, a new aluminium-based medicine packaging provides improved child resistance characteristics, assisting pharmaceutical companies in their compliance with Child Resistance legislation.
New regulations within the European Union have placed new standards on packaging in which some manufacturers have had to implement a radical overhaul of their production processes. For example, the new legislation in the UK - the Medicines (Child Safety) Regulations 2003 - came into effect last October and holds that child resistant packs should be accredited according to two standards - BS 8404 and ISO 8317.
Both standards use panels of children to test for child resistance and panels of adults to test for openability. The legislation initially affects products containing paracetamol, aspirin and iron (24mg or over).
The material has been fully tested and approved to comply with European child-resistant standards (EN 14375). Several major customers have already assessed and approved the structure on their lines, and their new packs will appear on store shelves in the near future.
"Given its benefits in terms of compliance and ease of implementation, Guardlid is the choice for manufacturers whose products and packs are impacted by the new legislation," said Michael Rubenstein, president, Alcan Global Pharmaceutical Packaging.
"Having invented the first child resistant blister lidding material, our focus on innovation has led us to develop new products for both child resistant and senior citizen friendly packaging, such as Guardlid," he added.
Alcan's latest product, along with such manufacturering efforts from Meadwestvaco, Dragon Plastics and Rexam serve as the ideal response to the question of whether the drug industry is doing enough to tackle the issue of child safety.
Their efforts cannot be helped by the fluidity constraints of legal requirements and the fundamental difficulty in designing a child-resistant pack - particularly for a recloseable - that is also openable by its intended user who may be old or incapacitated.