In Closing
Phil Meshberg and his child-resistant closure. Pioneer Finds Spray to Protect Children
Walk around at the Society of Cosmetic Chemists Suppliers' Day, EastPack, or HBA Global Expo this year in New York City, and you may encounter a lot of patriotism in the shape of a bottle. But don't take this as just the packaging industry's version of the car flags so popular after September 11. The American Flag Packaging pin, a gold-plated pin fashioned after O. Berk Co.'s (Union, NJ) bottle-jar-and-cap logo, holds even deeper meaning. The pins will be distributed at O. Berk's booth at the three events, and the firm has suggested that pin wearers make donations to the Dr. Fred Rimmele III Scholarship Fund.
Phil Meshberg has spent a good portion of his career making sprayed and inhaled products easier to use. So it's ironic that now he has found a way to complicate their use—for children, that is.
By October 16, 2002, packagers of hydrocarbon-containing cosmetics and personal care products will need to have added child-resistant packaging to their designs. To prevent children from inhaling or ingesting hydrocarbons, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) will require child-resistant packaging for all low-viscosity household products that contain 10% or more hydrocarbons by weight. The rule applies to a number of cosmetics and personal care products, like baby oils, sunscreens, nail-enamel dryers, hair oils, makeup removers, and bath, body, and massage oils.
Quite familiar with spray technology, Meshberg's previous innovations prepared him for providing a solution to CPSC's requirement. In 1955, he and his company Emson (the predecessor to Emsar) designed, built, and filed a patent for the first metered valve, which replaced the constant-stream valves that tended to release more product than necessary. He then adapted this design and married it to a stainless-steel container for nebulizing asthma medicine, eliminating the need for glass-bulb designs that broke easily and often. At his latest venture, Packaging Concepts Associates Inc. (PCA; Boynton Beach, FL), he invented the MPak spray dispenser, a self-contained one-piece design using a metered valve. It features a leakproof locking device with a tamper-evident tab and no dust cover. He also devised a way to prevent sprayers for hairsprays and antiperspirants from getting clogged, developing and patenting an orifice closure that keeps out the air responsible for drying and clogging product that is left in the dispensing valve.
CPSC's new requirement presented yet another challenge. "Finding compliant spray dispensers could be a problem," Meshberg remembers thinking. "Nothing really existed when the new regulations were issued. I looked at a number of possible approaches, and I decided that the key to a child-resistant sprayer lay in the actuator." His solution was to modify the MPak design so that its actuator rotates to a dispensing position and locks with a flexible tab when turned to the nondispensing position. The closure's housing snaps onto the bottle, making removal difficult.
After nearly 100 worldwide patents, Meshberg waits for the next challenge, still working every day at PCA. He continues to control the entire process of designing and developing packages that are eventually licensed to other companies worldwide. He and his team design prototypes, create tooling to produce them, and mold, assemble, and test them in their lab. Part of that testing includes running the prototypes on in-house filling lines. Such in-house capabilities allow his company to take on custom projects for other companies and "engineer out" any problems well before packages are turned over to customers.