| By Liu Yuanyuan, Asia Manufacturing |
| Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
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A variety of plastic materials, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and nylon, are increasingly finding a home in the production of pharmaceutical packs. |
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Today, blister packs are becoming the most common packaging format for solid medicines, while PP, PE and PET bottles are also being widely used in pharmaceutical packaging applications.
Use of plastic materials is growing slowly in the injection packaging sector, in spite of the expectation that plastic bottles may replace ampoules to become the primary packaging format for injections in the future. There are concerns that plastics may contaminate the contents. |
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Plastic materials, however, are gaining popularity in the large infusion packaging applications. Statistics show that China is currently home to more than 200 GMP-certified infusion manufacturers, with annual production capacity of approximately 3 billion bottles of infusions. Some major infusion manufacturers, including Double-Crane Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, are using plastic bottles or bags for their products.
The growing polyolefin-based plastic bags and BOPP (biaxially oriented polypropylene) bottles are winning more market share from the glass bottle concept, which currently makes up of over 80 per cent of China’s large infusion packaging market. The low cost, high capacity BOPP bottles are being widely used by China’s manufacturers of large infusion products. A number of facilities for the production of |
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polyolefin-based infusion bags have been set up in China.
However, the high cost has posed a significant challenge to the prevalence of polyolefin-based infusion bags. In addition, flexible plastic bottles are expanding their application in the oral solution packaging sector, while rigid plastic bottles are gradually replacing glass bottles as a packaging format for high-volume liquid drugs.
Plastic bags, bottles and blisters are the main packaging formats for solid drugs including tablets, granules and powders. Blister packs for the most part are made of PVC and CFF materials. The low-cost PVC delivers outstanding compatibility and sealing performance, but is less competitive in terms of barrier properties. For this reason, some companies have developed a PVC material plated with a special resin film coating to improve barrier performance. |
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