Overview:
Nylabone set out to eliminate hard-to-recycle blister packaging across its product lines¹, driven by sustainability goals and retailer pressure for more responsible materials. They sought to transition from traditional plastic blisters to FSC-certified mono-material paperboard formats made without plastic, without compromising durability, visibility, or retail performance. This required redesigning structures, reworking supply chains, and aligning cross-functional teams.
The result: a scalable packaging solution that eliminated more than 40 tons of plastic², improved recyclability, maintained a strong brand presence, and ran efficiently on existing equipment.
The redesigned package by TOPPAN was recognized with a 2025 AmeriStar Award for Sustainable Packaging, highlighting its combination of material reduction, recyclability, and operational performance.
The Challenge:
Blister packaging has long been the industry standard for durability, tamper resistance, and shelf visibility, but it comes with significant environmental drawbacks. The materials are difficult to recycle and contribute heavily to plastic waste. At the same time, retailers and consumers are increasingly demanding sustainable alternatives.
The challenge was redesigning packaging to meet strict functional and merchandising requirements while significantly reducing plastic use without disrupting operations.
The Solution
TOPPAN and Nylabone started by drawing a clear line: eliminate blister plastic wherever they could, without trading away product integrity and retail performance.
In practice, this looked like:
- Collaborating across teams from the start to define success. They united packaging engineering, sourcing, marketing, graphic design, and sales teams while working closely with suppliers and retail partners throughout development.
- Adopting folding and die-cutting techniques from the electronics industry to create internal paperboard structures that securely hold the chew toy without requiring a plastic blister and adding a water-based finish.
- Redesigning packaging structure and developing new tooling that runs on existing equipment, allowing Nylabone to implement changes without major capital investment.
- Testing rigorously to ensure the new formats were shelf ready and executing a phased rollout to let them scale across product lines without disruption.
- Running several iterations of the automation process, including initially using fold-over cards before transitioning to automated denesting magazines to ensure the new packaging design maintained machine uptime and efficiency.
- Optimizing the heat and dwell parameters to generate the pressure required to achieve a reliable card-to-card seal, which differed significantly from the previous card-to-blister packaging process.