The transition towards the circular economy for consumer healthcare packaging

sector’s contribution towards the circular economy”

The consumer healthcare industry is committed to driving more environmentally sustainable self-care, including supporting the transition towards a circular economy and contributing to the delivery of global efforts to reach net zero, without compromising on health outcomes, product safety, and consumers’ access to our products¹.  

Haleon is a global leader in consumer health, and our packaging plays a key role in delivering consumer health products to customers and consumers safely, ensuring a product’s effectiveness for its full shelf life. But globally, packaging waste poses significant challenges for the environment.  

We’re committed to making our packaging more sustainable. To do this, we’re working to move to a more circular model, making our packaging recycle-ready as a first step towards our ultimate objective of making all our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030 ². We’re also taking proactive steps to increase the usage of recycled content, bioplastic and pulp-based alternatives to plastic in our packaging. For example, across our oral health portfolio, we are switching our toothpaste tubes from multi-material laminates with an aluminium barrier to recycle-ready solutions using a single material. We have rolled out over 500 million recycle-ready toothpaste tubes as of June 2023, and key oral health brands in Europe are packaged in recycled board.  

Yet, in consumer health, there are some specific types of packaging that have historically not been recyclable, such as blister packs for over-the-counter medicines and wellness brands.  

There are specific challenges, which, if addressed, could help our sector drive adoption of innovative, more sustainable blister packs: 

• Material availability and cost: The availability and costs of materials of sufficient quality to include in primary medicinal packaging continues to pose challenges for our sector. To establish a well-functioning supply chain for recycled materials, investments in improved collection, sorting, and recycling infrastructure are required. 
• Regulatory landscape: We encourage efforts to ensure the regulatory landscape is supportive of our sector’s contribution towards the circular economy. For instance, there is a need for a structured dialogue between the medicine regulators, policy makers, industry, waste management, recyclers and other competent authorities to explore and facilitate the adoption of recycled content in medicinal primary packaging where quality, safety and performance standards are met. 
• Additionally streamlining regulatory approvals for innovative sources of packaging materials, which are chemically identical to current ones, but come from a different source, could help aid the faster deployment of recycled content in blister packs. 
• Collaboration: Crucially, we can’t drive this transition alone. We believe in the fundamental importance of working with partners within and beyond our sector to drive global and local initiatives to improve the recyclability of consumer health product packaging. These efforts require new modes of collaboration between suppliers, brand owners, retailers, consumers, waste management and re-processors.  

It is no small feat that toothpaste tubes from companies across our sector can now be recycled at kerbside. With the right shifts in the external landscape, enhancements to recycled content supply chains, and above all, a bold spirit of collaboration, we believe that the challenge of the circular economy for blister packs can be met. 

Haleon welcomes the leadership of the International Chamber of Commerce in coordinating and conveying business perspectives into important forums, such as the UN, WTO and G20, and the sharing of sustainability best practice, and its impact on the economy, environment and society.