PA + PulPac Blister Collective The mission: The Bottle Collective from PA and PulPac has joined forces with leading brand partners (including Bayer, Haleon, and Sanofi) to create the world’s first Dry Molded Fiber blister pack.
PA and PulPac have developed the underlying technology needed to bring a functioning DMF tablet blister pack to life. We now have the first proof of concept to demonstrate viability. Manufacturing partners and select brands across consumer health, pharmaceutical, and FMCG industries are being welcomed to participate in the collective to further accelerate development and bring the technology to scale. Our approach using a Collective is quite unique. It allows for multiple parties across the value chain to all contribute toward solving a massive global challenge. PulPac brings the foundational Dry Molded Fiber technology, while PA Consulting has an 80-year legacy as an innovation consultancy bringing ingenuity to life. Companies involved in the Collective benefit from accelerated learning and new growth. Our purpose is to create a new, pulp-based Blister Pack and production process that can be a like-for-like, scalable alternative to PVC and other “problem” or difficult to recycle plastics used in current thermoform blister packs. The stakes are incredibly high and quite critical – sustainability efforts are a global need, and this collective will help further the changes necessary to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals and Sustainability targets. Our focus is demonstrating a technology process capable of creating DMF blister packs, in a range of tablet arrays, that offers suitable shape, pack count, speed, throughput, barrier properties, and cost to be a viable commercial alternative for commodity blister packs.
The technology: The Blister Pack Collective utilises Dry Molded Fiber (DMF) technology to develop blister packs that eliminate or minimise the use of plastics in over-the-counter prescription drugs and nutraceuticals. DMF technology significantly reduces the use of plastics and water, cutting carbon emissions. The process is designed to be high speed and low cost, using a proprietary “continuous rotary formation” process to create highly versatile tablet arrays that match the pitch design and tablet count of commodity blisters. Our first prototypes support a like-for-like, scalable solution with a 10m/minute production speed. First products in market will boast a 90+% plastic reduction, a variety of barrier solutions, and parity cost and production volumes to toady’s plastic blisters. This solution is quite different than other paper or mono-material packaging solutions. We can produce a myriad of sizes and shapes not possible in other alternatives today. The key difference between our solutions and other blister pack inventions is the Dry Molded Fiber technology, which allows the ability to shift size, shape, and functionality of our blister tablet packs to accommodate the varying needs of individual brands.