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Child Safe Packaging Group

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The Child-Safe Packaging Group Tenth Anniversary - August 2005



August 2005

This August marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Child-Safe Packaging Group, which back in 1995 in a blaze of publicity exposed the then inequitable testing regimes applying to flexible packs as opposed to reclosable ones and called for a level playing field of testing for all packs containing products potentially dangerous to children.

Seen as a pressure group then, the Child-Safe Packaging Group has developed into a trade association whose objective became…. ‘to promote the specification and success of child resistant packaging for all products whose ingestion or other contact could prove seriously distressing to a child.’

The Child-Safe Packaging Group (CSPG) is not a large organization, on formation it contained eight members representing the manufacturers of rigid or reclosable systems but it now consists of twelve members, evenly split between both flexible; that is strip and blister pack manufacturers, and rigid; the familiar bottle and child resistant closure. Some members have been lost on the way but many others have joined.

The CSPG is now affiliated to the Packaging Federation. It sponsors design competitions at UK universities, notably Sheffield and Manchester Metropolitan. Papers have been presented throughout northern Europe and in the United States of America.

As a trade association the group is charged with strategically promoting child resistant packaging alongside the interests of its members. For the past ten years the CSPG’s interests have been driven by Stephen Wilkins the Secretary.

Stephen Wilkins said ‘The Child-safe Packaging Group has been a catalyst for the introduction of two new standards; one British, one Pan-European, which will help to create better flexible packs. A new standard for rigid packs has been published, this again will make them more acceptable to adults and help to banish forever the old quip about adults not being able to access their medicines when packed in child resistant packs.’

‘This is interesting,’ continued Wilkins ‘because child resistant packaging remains the only packaging for any product which has to be tested for openability by adults. It has already and will continue to make for a more consumer acceptable pack and the system of testing for adult openability could well be applied to packaging generally.’

The next ten years? Stephen Wilkins would like the group to thrive as a trade association, to attract new members and to become a repository of research which can be placed at the disposal not only of members but the industry generally.