ANAHEIM, CALIF. — Rexam Medical Packaging is ramping up production at a new Mexican operation targeting that country's hospital market.
The operation, Rexam Medical Packaging Mexicana, was established in August in a 47,000-square-foot Guadalajara facility that now employs 50. The plant has space to add more product lines and equipment as market demand grows.
``RMPM was developed to better serve the needs of Mexico's health-care market and to complement the existing North American manufacturing asset base,'' Jerry Bennish, business director for bags and films, said at a Jan. 26 news conference during the Medical Design & Manufacturing West exposition in Anaheim.
Rexam also manufactures at sites in Madison, Wis.; Mundelein, Ill.; Ashland, Mass.; Mount Holly, N.J.; Singapore; Brazil; and five European countries. The Guadalajara site fulfills plans that Rexam disclosed at MD&MW in 1997.
Bennish also announced a new line of coextruded film-based products using single-site metallocene polymer blends.
The line includes two thermoform-fill-seal films: Integra Form SP for packaging soft medical devices such as drapes, gowns, gloves or gauze packs, and Integra Form SF for packaging hard medical devices such as syringes or catheters.
Jeremy Harvey, business director for laminations and pouches, announced a nonconventional Core-Peel product that separates seal and peel layers in a three-layer coextrusion pack that does not need a heat-seal coating.
The seal layer embeds itself into the fiber structure of a porous medical packaging substrate such as DuPont's Tyvek. The formulation breaks cleanly, both at the peel blend layer and the end of the seal.
Demonstrating the product, ``we see the seal actually change color to blue to give confidence there were no voids in the seal,'' Harvey said.
John Merritt, business director for coated products and lids, introduced a family of four universal Integra Peel coatings with performance gains in porosity, high humidity, high-temperature creep resistance and lower activation temperatures.
Merritt also announced a line of proprietary natural latex-free Integra Peel cold-seal packaging systems. The line includes banding tapes and light-weight paper systems for medicated and non-medicated dressings and adhesive bandages.
Merritt noted that a Food and Drug Administration rule, effective June 27, requires labeling of packaging and device materials and adhesives containing natural latex.
The Mundelein-based Rexam Medical Packaging division employs 780 and recorded 1998 sales of more than $300 million, about 10 percent of the total for parent Rexam plc of London.