Why Do Pill Bottles Have Cotton Balls in Them?
When you buy a bottle of over-the-counter pain relievers, you might expect to open it up and have to pull out a wad of cotton that’s stuffed inside at the top. It’s a curious bit of packaging, considering you didn’t order a side of craft supplies with your medicine. So why do you find a puff of white cotton in your pill bottle?
When pharmaceutical companies began putting cotton in pill bottles, it served a practical purpose. While that eventually became obsolete, the cotton itself proved hard to get rid of.
It Started With Aspirin Bottles
The practice began with Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company behind aspirin. In the early 20th century, Bayer began using cotton wads in its aspirin bottles not to keep the medicine fresh, but to solve a more straightforward problem.
Aspirin tablets, made with acetylsalicylic acid as their active ingredient, could be quite fragile, breaking or crumbling as they rattled around inside the containers during transport. The cotton filled the empty space above the pills, helping keep them from moving around and breaking apart before they reached the customer.
More from our network
Coated Tablets Changed the Game
It was a simple solution that, by the 1950s, was standard in most pill bottles. But as pharmaceutical technology improved, including the proliferation of chemical binders, tablets became better equipped to withstand the trials of shipping. Then, in the 1980s, Bayer began coating its aspirin tablets to help prevent breakage. With the pills better protected, the cotton no longer had much work to do. But the company didn’t immediately remove it. Bayer’s cotton ball practice continued for years after the coated tablets were introduced — in fact, the company didn’t discontinue cotton in most of its aspirin bottles until 1999.
Earlier that same year, Bayer introduced its aspirin gelcaps without cotton. The move prompted the company to reconsider the packaging across its product line, and when it finally did away with cotton balls, it was a big enough change that it made headline news in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal. A company spokesperson said at the time that the reason cotton had stayed in the bottles for so long was simply that it was tradition.
Bayer’s decision didn't mean the end of cotton wadding in all pill bottles, though. Other manufacturers, including Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and the makers of Maalox, continued using it in their products.
Why Is Cotton in Bottles Today?
Cotton still hasn’t disappeared from every medicine bottle, and it isn’t always there just out of habit. Bayer itself continues to use it in some products to minimize breakage during shipping. This includes enteric-coated tablets, which have a special coating designed to prevent stomach irritation.Supplement maker Now Foods still uses cotton in certain products to protect tablets from damage, while consumers have also reported commonly finding cotton in generic bottles of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and in bottles of Claritin — another Bayer brand.
Regardless of how it ended up there, the little cotton wad shouldn’t stay in the bottle. MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine’s consumer health resource, advises removing the cotton after the bottle has been opened. Once the seal is broken, the cotton can actually draw moisture into the container, potentially affecting the medicine it was created to protect more than a century ago.
