Butterfly reveals tube dispensing system to reduce waste

Simeon Goldstein, packagingnews.co.uk, 04 March 2009

Butterfly Technology is seeking commercial partners to further develop its "Squeeze with Ease" tube dispensing technology that is designed to reduce product wastage and improve value for money.

Squeeze with Ease is the culmination of two years of work by Sue Bell, a clinical nurse, her husband William, an engineer, and product designer Jonathan Jones.

Bell told Packaging News she "used to get frustrated" that her patients found it difficult to get "every last drop of product" from a tube. Squeeze with Ease has been developed to not only reduce waste, but to be used by those with poor manual dexterity.

The device is inserted in a plastic or laminate tube before it is sealed. It is pushed along the tube, "like a piston", ensuring the entire product is used and a slight suck back action reduces caking of the cap and nozzle.

Bell admitted that adding an extra bit of material would be an increase in packaging, but that the overall environmental impact would be reduced, as it would mean less product wastage.

"If you use the product for longer, over time you use less new packaging and less product is thrown away," she said. "Ideally, we'd also want the Squeeze with Ease component to be made from recycled material."

Bell said Squeeze with Ease would be suitable for a huge range of markets from high value cosmetics to medicine. "In pharmaceuticals alone, our device has the potential to offer millions of pounds worth of savings to the NHS," she said.

 

Butterfly Technology is based in Kew, Surrey and was set up in 2007, after Bell took a sabbatical to look at developing a devise to improve the dispensing of medical creams.