Due to its numerous positive characteristics, glass can be defined as the first choice of packaging material for many products, either for food, beverages or pharmaceuticals. Glass containers are chemically inert, can easily be heated and sterilized and are suitable to protect the content from contamination. The most common types of glass used in the pharmaceutical industry are Type I, Type II and Type III which are determined by their degree of hydrolytic resistance.
Over the past year Stoelzle R&D Team worked on the development of an innovative, resource-efficient, safe and stable process for Type II glass´ production used for acidic and neutral aqueous preparations be it parenteral or non-parenteral.
“Our intention was to develop a new process for inner treatment of soda silica glass to reduce the main weakness of the current two existing processes regarding stability and safety and to develop a process which also fits smaller bottles by enabling optimal dosing of the treatment,” said Mr. Alexander Stern, CSCO Stoelzle Glass Group & Head of BU Pharma.
“In line with our goal of being the first-choice partner for the global pharmaceutical industry we have been working on broadening our range of pharma primary packaging to better serve our clients’ needs. Adhering to our overall Group’s sustainability goals, we developed a process, which ensures a consistent high quality, guarantees a high level of work safety in production with a minimum impact on the environment,” explained Mrs. Antonia Karamat, Deputy. Global Sales Director BU Pharma & Sales Director Medical & Laboratory.
Dr. Niklas Zwettler, Head of R&D at Stoelzle Glass Group added, “With our process, we also aimed to overcome difficulties that other treatment technologies face with small containers sizes. Extensive laboratory analysis and inline samplings of container sizes ranging from 6 to 250 ml showed a good stability of our process over a wide range of filling volumes and adherence to all requirements of US and European Pharmacopoeias for Type II Glass.
Close cooperation between company’s engineers and production specialists during the development process allows Stoelzle to set a date for industrial production start-up by mid-2021. With already produced industrial samples, full production of Stoelzle Type II is aimed to start June 2021 in one of Stoelzle pharma dedicated plants in Köflach, Austria. The plant has two furnaces with a daily capacity of 270 tons of glass. Currently, around 1.5 billion pieces of white, amber and green packaging glass are produced annually on eleven fully automated production lines.
For further information, please contact Mr. Alexander Stern, CSCO Stoelzle Glass Group & Head of BU Pharma at pharma@stoelzle.com.