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Cardinal Health Earns Recognition for Plant-Based Phase-Change Materials

Healthcare company earns honors from the Reusable Packaging Assn. for its efforts with Sonoco ThermoSafe that deliver multiple benefits in shipments of refrigerated pharmaceuticals.

Cardinal Health, Inc., a global integrated healthcare services and products company, was recognized by the Reusable Packaging Assn. (RPA) for its holistic, innovative approach to ensuring the safe, efficient, and sustainable delivery of refrigerated pharmaceuticals

In early October, RPA announced Cardinal Health as the winner of the 2016 Excellence in Reusable Packaging award. “We were impressed with the innovation reflected in all of the entries we received this year,” said Tim Debus, President & CEO of the RPA. “However, Cardinal Health’s holistic approach and the significant business and environmental results they achieved made their submission stand out. In fact, our judges cited the impressive impact demonstrated in multiple areas, including material safety, material reuse, ergonomics, fuel/emissions, and cost savings as key factors in their selection.”

Cardinal Health delivers refrigerated pharmaceuticals to more than 24,000 retail chain and independent pharmacies every day. Faced with $4 million in temperature-related product spoilage annually and the excessive cost and waste of single-use shipping materials, they needed cost-effective packaging solutions that could maintain product within narrow temperature levels and reduce their overall environmental impact. They partnered with Sonoco ThermoSafe to create innovative end-to-end solutions.

Reusable plastic totes with replaceable molded expanded polystyrene (EPS) liners were already the Cardinal Health standard. The water-based coolant gel-packs within the totes however were replaced with plant-based PureTemp® phase-change materials to improve temperature control.

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