Sustainable Pharmaceutical Packaging: Innovations, Challenges and Future Perspective

Packaging plays an important role in pharmaceuticals by maintaining drug stability, shelf life, and effectiveness. It provides physical and biological barrier to the drug and protects it from the external environment and contamination. Depending upon the level of safety, packaging is of three major types – primary packaging, secondary packaging, and tertiary packaging. However conventional packaging systems use glass, plastic, aluminum, cardboard and other non-biodegradable material which in turn generates a lot of plastic waste, increases landfill, pollutes the ecosystem, and raises greenhouse gas production. To tackle these challenges sustainable packaging materials such as starch, chitosan, xylan, chitin, and proteins are emerging as alternatives. Recent innovations including sustainable blister packaging, smart intelligent packaging system, intelligent indicator system, nano coatings providing support biodegradable packaging systems. Despite the benefits of environmental, economic, regulatory compliance, and drug safety and quality there are some major challenges such as high cost, limited availability of raw material, and performance and durability issues, due to which the use of sustainable packaging is limited. These limitations can be overcome through advanced manufacturing techniques, multifunctional active packaging, integration of nanotechnology which are the future trends and new technologies emerging in packaging.