One of the world’s most widely used forms of packaging – the blister pack – can now be made totally in paperboard. Two major benefits are reduced environmental impact and less consumer rage and self-injury. Blister packs are made to hang on a holder in the retail store and often consist of a paperboard backing plus a molded transparent plastic front section to display the product to the consumer. The Norwegian converter Moltzaus’s ingeniously designed Cefapac improves both the pack’s environmental performance and its openability, and has already won awards.
“Our development work had two starting points – environmental impact and ease of opening,” explains Eirik Faukland, the packaging veteran in charge of R&D at Moltzau. “To get around the well-known problem of the extreme difficulty of opening plastic blister packs, the basic concept was to replace the plastic with paperboard. What’s unique with the Cefapac solution is that we chose to replace all the traditional creases with perforations, which gives the desired openability.”