Contribution in the technical report

 The following part is one of the portion of my contribution to the technical report

3. Benefits of Solution

This section of the report is to show the benefits of using PLAnacea™ as the product material and the product features. 

3.1 Materials Used

• Polylactic Acid (PLA)

PLA is made from organic and renewable sources like sugarcane and cornstarch unlike plastic which are normally made from processing crude oil. PLA can reduce carbon footprint as well compared to plastic as it is made from crops that can absorb carbon dioxide as it grows. Additionally, PLA takes less energy to produce which means that it produces less greenhouse gases that are harmful to the environment (Barrett, 2020).

It is beneficial at its end-of-life usage as it is compostable and when it is incinerated, it generates less toxic fumes than plastics. Unlike plastic, recycling of PLA is not an issue as it can still be recycled even if it is contaminated by food and when PLA degrades, it turns into a non-toxic acid which means it is not harmful to humans (Barrett, 2020).

Therefore, by using PLA as the material to use for the medicine packaging, it would be an ideal solution to solve the issue of plastic pollution to the environment when it is disposed of.

3.2 Features

Figure 6

Top view for the inner part of PLAnacea™

Note : This picture shows the top view of the inner part of the PLAnacea™

The features included in PLAnacea™  will improve and solve the issues with current medicine packaging, benefiting the patients and the environment.

In figure 6, the canister is designed to contain up to three different types of pills with varying sizes depending on the number of types of pills needed in order to reduce the amount of plastic used to pack the medicine individually, and it can be easily opened to access the inner part of the canister to place the medicine into it. The pills would be packed separately into a strip-like blister and placed into the roller inside of the canister where the pills are able to be pulled out from the hole at the side of the canister. To avoid obstruction when pulling out different pills from the canister, a partition wall would be catered inside the canister to allow easy retrieval of the pills.

Figure 7

Front view of PLAnacea™

Note : This picture shows the top view of the PLAnacea™  with numerical and colour indicators on it, as well as braille for the visually impaired. This will be the top view of what the consumers will see.

Figure 8

Back view of the PLAnacea™

Note: This picture shows the back view of PLAnacea™ where it will have a prescription pasted on it that will indicate the type of medicine included in the packaging and instructions on which number to take the medicine required

In figure 7 and 8, the prescription of the pills would be labelled on one side of the outer part of the canister and on the other side, there would be a numerical and colour indicator which would be labelled from 1 to 3 and red, blue, purple respectively. 

This is to indicate the pills based on the prescription and knowing which medicine they are supposed to pull out for consumption. Braille would be provided alongside the numbers and colour indicators to cater to patients that are visually-impaired.