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Pharmaceutical companies know that packaging is much more than a product box. For pharmaceutical products, packaging also plays a role in product quality, integrity, and security: carefully managed temperature-controlled packaging keeps your products arriving in the right condition and alerts you and your customers to potential security threats, like divergence.

At the same time, pharmaceutical packaging contributes heavily to the industry’s waste and environmental footprint. And, pharmaceutical manufacturers are some of the largest waste producers in the world.

So how can your pharmaceutical company balance its needs for product quality, integrity, and security with a desire to reduce waste across the industry? Here are three tips that will help your company reduce waste while maintaining compliance.

1. Begin the Transition to Recyclable Packaging Materials.

The cold-chain manufacturing and shipping process is incredibly strict, but you are no longer limited to the same bulky, landfill-bound materials for compliance. More and more packaging providers are moving away from traditional expanded polystyrene and towards materials like paper cooler or reusable packaging solutions.

For operations directors or quality managers, it may be time to initiate an internal conversation about what packaging your organisation chooses for its cold chain solutions. You might be surprised by what you save by eliminating some of the expected and hidden costs associated with traditional cold-chain packaging.

And by removing waste from the product life cycle, you’ll have less waste to manage in your own facilities, creating even more cost savings.

2. Choose Suppliers Committed to Waste Reduction.

The pharmaceutical supply chain is a complex one but also one with many known partners. While your organisation can only control what’s happening within your own manufacturing and warehouse space, you can influence the rest of the supply chain by working with suppliers who have a commitment to waste reduction.

By choosing suppliers strategically, you can not only influence the supply chain’s impact on generating waste, but you can also create a knowledge loop and learn from each other’s research. So as contracts come up for renewal, consider what your vendors do to minimise waste on their own. Do they recycle? Do they compact or bale waste for reduced vehicle movements? How carefully planned is their own waste management program?

It’s a small community – your influence may mean more than you realise.

3. Work With a Waste Management Partner.

The final piece of the puzzle is controlling what waste you must produce as best you can. To do this, work with a local waste management partner. Waste management solution providers like LSM offer flexible cardboard and recycling baler products that come in sizes suited for low, medium, and high-volume organisations and are available as rentals for scaling during peak production or distribution periods.

As an added benefit, better managing your waste with a cardboard baler can help you:

• Control your waste costs
• Lower your retrieval and landfill fills
• Decrease your required storage space
• Improve productivity by retrieving time from waste-related administrative tasks

Are you ready to learn how you can streamline your pharmaceutical waste management program? Contact the LSM team today to learn more about the recycling baler options for the pharmaceutical industries.