Accessible Packaging - Rationale

Accessible Packaging

Today there are many different types of disabilities that makes it difficult to both open and close packaging. There is a huge market of packaging closures, and the probability of finding a closure, that people with a specific disability will be able to use, is good. The problem is then that the big range of closures not are used on every single product - often a product has the same closure even if it is from different companies. That means some people with a specific disability don´t have the opportunity to choose the exact product they want the most. They have to choose by which closure the product has and that does not seem fair.

This project focuses on the disability Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) and how to make it easier for this group to access a product they should use a lot of and in this case it is olive oil. The syndrome affects your hands strength - some studies have estimated that people with CTS only are capable of exerting about 50% of their hand strength. The syndrome also leads to weakness, pain and sometimes numbness in the hand, and therefore it seems even more difficult to access different types of packaging.

The most common way to get affected by CTS is by daily work, where you are using your hands a lot and in the same movement over and over again. Construction workers, especially those who are using vibrating tools, are in high risk of getting affected by CTS, which workers at an assembly line also are. Some people are genetic born with CTS, because their carpal canals are smaller than average. Women are more likely to be affected by CTS, and often it affects people between 30 and 60 years old (University of Maryland Medical Center, 2013).

People, who were a part of the studies about hand strength, should answer which day-to-day packaging they saw as the most difficult to use compared to the closure. The majority thought it was jam jars with screw lids and bottles with screw caps (The Wall Street Journal, 2012).

The major problem seems to be the screw cap or lid, and almost every single olive oil packaging have closures consisting of screw caps. Therefore this project tries to find a better packaging solution for people with CTS. When they only have one hand with 100% strength it is obvious to make a packaging, where you only have to use one hand to open and close it.

The final solution is a mechanism, where you have to squeeze the bottle made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) to get the olive oil out of the bottle. When you stop squeezing the bottle, the mechanism will make sure that no olive oil runs out. You only have to use one hand to hold around the oval shaped bottle and then tilt it and squeeze. The PET bottle has a cap made of polypropylene (PP) and inside that all the mechanism is placed. It is a round membrane of rubber with a pattern existing of three lines running through each other at the centre. This pattern goes through the rubber vertical, but it is so thin that the liquid olive oil can´t run out before you squeeze the bottle. A bussning made of PP makes sure that the menbrane of rubber is sealed at the inside of the cap.

The olive oil can easily be damaged by heat and light, because these will start an oxidation inside the bottle and that will affect the olive oils flavour, freshness and texture. Therefore an oxygen scavenger is incorporated in the PET bottle, which will stop the oxidation inside the bottle (Wiley Online Library, 2010).

The volume of the bottle is 75 cl, which is the most common used bottle volume in the olive oil industry, and the size and the oval shape also fits good ergonomic in one hand. The PET is chosen because it is more resistant to oil and fat than other plastic materials, it is sustainable and it is easier in weight to lift compared to glass, which is also used a lot in the olive oil industry (Piscopo and Poiana, 2012).