O-I’s HealthCare Packaging Group in the US says it has already developed, and is now perfecting, six specific ways to RFID source tag plastic containers and closures produced for some of the US’s major healthcare product manufacturers.
Driven largely by mandates from America’s Food and Drug Enforcement Agency (FDA), which place increased onus on drug manufacturers to be able to track and trace their products back to source, the O-I healthcare packaging business has worked over the last 18 months to find cost-effective ways of incorporating RFID tags into the wide range of predominantly PP and HDPE containers and closures it manufactures. The company emphasises that, as a container, seal and closure manufacturer, it is “not bound by traditional panel placement and orientation” for tags.
Roger Smith, director of global technology and innovation for HealthCare Packaging, elaborates: “Aside from responding to the various FDA mandates – the Agency has publicly stated it regards RFID as one of the key technological allies against counterfeiting of drugs and medicines (and would ideally like to see pharma items individually tagged by 2007) – what we are seeking to do with our RFID work is add value to the packaging we deliver to healthcare customers. Our aim is to offer something above and beyond what label converters are already doing.
“In the last 18 months, working with major healthcare product producing customers, we have developed six specific ways to incorporate RFID inlays directly into both plastic container bodies and into closures.”
While Smith said it was “still too early to disclose details” of five of the techniques, he was happy to provide some information on the method with which O-I is furthest advanced. “Using specially built equipment retrofitted to our blowmoulding and injection moulding machines we have found a way to embed RFID inlays into the plastic base of the containers,” he explains. “Being hidden within the base, the tags are not only invisible to the consumer but also virtually impossible to tamper with. To date our trials suggest the embedding process has no effect on blowmoulding speeds, although clearly there will be a cost premium to customers.”
King says data can either be prewritten to the read/write tags it has experimented with to date prior to filling, part-written and added to by the customer on the filling line, or entirely written to the transponder at the filling stage. He explains: “This means customers can keep a close eye on individual packs and their contents right from pack manufacture to capping and add whatever data they wish, when required.”
To date, he explains, the trials have only been small-scale, but the results have been encouraging: “Several of our customers are actively involved; we hope to undertake a really large-scale pilot later this year and anticipate being able to tag hundreds of thousands of containers by some time in 2007.”
