Pharmaceutical single use plastic

[bluejourney]

I’ve often thought that pharmaceutical products create an awful lot of single use plastic. Just found out that you can recycle your empty medicine blister packets at participating Superdrugs, as part of the Terracycle Medicine Packet Recycling Programme. Phew, that’s one less thing to worry about!

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK]

Medicines packet recycling scheme scaled back following ‘high uptake’

Independent pharmacies received millions of empty medicines packets to recycle, but did not have the infrastructure to process them all.

pharmaceutical-journal.com/...

[bluejourney in reply to helvella]

Thanks, helvella, interesting information. I noted after I posted that you have replied with information on this issue before. It doesn’t seem to be well publicised, I suppose because the blister packs are hard to recycle. I wonder if the pharma companies are doing anything to make the materials the packs are made of more easy to recycle. They could also say on the blister pack they are recyclable, then we’d all know. If our household is anything to go by, we all use enough of them, and I feel bad putting them in the bin.

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK in reply to bluejourney]

Where I am, we put plastic food containers, aluminium and steel cans all together.

It feels like it would be sensible to place blister packaging in the same place! But no, we shouldn't.

However, I'd have thought that would be the best approach, rather than yet another separated waste stream. I noticed from the map that quite a number of people are more than 100 miles from a Superdrug which accepts the packaging.

[SlowDragon Administrator]

Only at 195 locations across U.K.

terracycle.com/en-GB/brigad...