According to The World Health Organization and UNICEF’s World Report on Child Injury Prevention, “Child-resistant packaging is one of the best-documented successes in preventing the unintentional poisoning of children.” In fact, prior to the enactment of the Poison Prevention Packaging Act (PPPA) in 1970 – which specified the first requirements in the United States for child-resistant packaging – pediatricians widely considered poisoning by common household substances to be the leading cause of injuries for children under five years old.
Until recently, however, products requiring child resistance were relegated to rigid containers, as flexible packaging options were limited and costly. A flexible packaging solution that met the criteria for child-resistance and was not prohibitively expensive would allow for a wide variety of product segments to convert from rigid containers to flexible for the first time. Now, as manufacturers across a wide range of industries seek to gain the sustainability and cost saving benefits of flexible substrates – catapulting the format’s popularity – a child-resistant packaging option appears to be the logical and necessary next step in the evolution of child-resistance.