The pharmaceutical industry has been a particularly prosperous sector in recent years. The advancement of the average age of the population and the introduction of increasingly innovative technologies have led to a growing demand for diversified products and, consequently, to protective packaging with customizable formats. For reasons of cost, transformability and different performance properties, plastic is the most used material in this sector. The use of fossil sources inevitably leads to reflect on the serious environmental impact. The thesis addresses the issue of sustainability in the field of pharmaceutical packaging, describing the state of the art and highlighting the main factors that drive the sector towards a circular economy.