Faraday launches new child-resistant closures

With 80% of recorded accidental poisonings affecting children under four years old, Faraday Packaging Partnership commissioned leading psychologist Dr Belinda Winder at the University of Sheffield and international design consultancy Factory Design to create a number of new patent applied designs of child-resistant closures which are now available for licence.

Faraday will launch these new concepts at its FaraPack Briefing 2003 on 15-16 October in Leeds and is keen to open discussions regarding commercial partnerships.

Faraday Packaging Partnership commissioned quantitative research into consumer behaviour and attitudes, to understand the problem more fully. The study shows that many existing designs of child resistant closures present further problems to adult users because they are difficult to open. Dr Winder says: 'The key to our approach is to make the child-resistant closures cognitively difficult rather than physically difficult to open.'

Numerous ideas were generated at a creative event, from which a dozen concepts were created, ranging from those with a sophisticated interface to simple observations about consumer behaviour. Of these, six are now being filed for patenting. Adam White, of Factory Design, says: 'The designs use a range of approaches, some simply requiring a slightly larger hand size or the knowledge of how the closure works, and others based on keys or combinations.'