Contact lens manufacturers are making strides to produce more eco-friendly contact lens packaging and reduce wastage. Aware of the increased demand for greener alternatives, suppliers are starting to include sustainability considerations earlier in the R&D and product development processes.
Menicon has been rethinking product development for over a decade and taking steps to become more sustainable, considering what goes into products and the ways they are made.
A great example of this is the introduction of Miru 1day Flat Pack in 2011. Designed with consumers and sustainability in mind, this innovative contact lens product and its packaging reduce the amount of plastic used when compared to conventional daily disposables lenses.
The unique blister pack shapes, measure around 1mm thick, compared to an average of 8mm in conventional blister packaging, making it the slimmest contact lens packaging in the world and significantly reducing the amount of packaging and raw materials needed. To put this into perspective if you were to have a one-year supply of 730 lenses, there is around 80% less waste in the amount of plastic used with the Miru 1day Flat Pack compared to conventional blisters (figure 1).1
In addition to the reduction in the amount of material used, Menicon also designed the product using recycled materials. For example, the contact lens storage case is made from recycled plastic from the contact lens moulds. Approximately 99% of the plastic used in the end-to-end manufacturing process of Miru 1day Flat Pack is recycled.2
The sophisticated CentraForm fully automated manufacturing process uses just one concave mould rather than two moulds (figure 2), resulting in less raw material and energy required, further adding to the eco-credentials.
Figure 2: Manufacturing process
The Miru 1day Flat Pack uses Smart Touch technology which offers hygienic hassle-free handling and active compliance benefits.3 The wearer only touches the outer lens surface due to the lens being positioned the right way up in the packaging, reducing the chance of contamination of the inner lens surface (figure 3). Less solution is needed in the blister, just 0.2ml, optimised for storage and discourages reuse of the blister as a storage holder, encouraging compliance to the single-use modality.
Figure 3: Smart Touch Technology1
The fitting set also has less the volume of packaging and shows further consideration of caring for the environment as well as reducing the amount of storage space needed in the practice.
This sustainable approach to product design, manufacturing and technology has successfully been applied to form a full family of lenses (sphere, toric and multifocal, displayed in figure 4) to suit wearers’ visual needs.
Figure 4 Miru 1day Flat Pack
Inevitably, sustainability will only continue to grow in importance and Menicon will continue to design products and processes that eliminate or reduce our carbon footprint. Menicon has signed up to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, committing to align our business operations with our environmental ethos to achieve these goals.
That the letters ‘eco’ are represented in the company’s name (figure 5) is testimony to the importance of caring for the environment to Menicon.
Figure 5 Menicon’s eco message
Neil Retallic is Global Professional Services Manager at Menicon and current President of the BCLA.
References
- Menicon data on file, Comparison to other previous Menicon products
- Menicon data on file, excluding products that have been shipped for use.
- Menicon data on file.
