Medicine Blister Pack Recycling Scheme

Use it All has teamed up with Lowestoft Town Council to run a pilot scheme on those pesky medicine blister packs.

There are now collection points in four locations.

Trinity Church, top of High Street

Uncle Sid's Zero Waste Store, High Street

The Olive Centre, Clapham Road

The Mayfly, High Street

Here you can deposit your empty medicine packs, and they will be eventually recycled by ReFactory.

We know from our two year Use It All campaign that there's an immense frustration that these composite foil and plastic items have to go to landfill or the incinerator.

This is very much a pilot scheme. It costs money to recycle - if the recycler has to pay for the empty packs, the recycling process cost is much greater than any income they can generate from products made from the recycled materials.

This is a scandal. 1.5 BILLION medication package units were distributed in 2020 in Germany. That's a lot. The UK won't be much different. A small, unknown, percentage is recycled

The NHS has no organisation-wide system of recycling. And in fact few GPs or Trusts have any programme of recycling. 

There's not much incentive for packaging manufacturers to invest in ways to make recycling easier. There's not much incentive for groups to find innovative methods of changing the process. So we keep adding to the plastic in the world, and using up metal, and therefore generally screwing the future.

• Waste in the environment:

  An estimated 52 million tonnes of plastic waste enters the environment every year. 

• Recycling:

  Only about 9% of the world's plastic is recycled, with the remaining 91% discarded, incinerated, or polluting the environment. 

This scheme is nevertheless important. It's both a campaign, and a practical solution - the best solution at this moment. At least in our neck of the woods, we can make a difference.

Use It All will be monitoring the amount collected, and the time to fill a box (each box is about 60 litres in volume). We're already working on various tweaks to the scheme to bring costs down, if only a tad. Maybe we can all collaborate to make it work?

Boots Stores have just launched a scheme. Use them! The collection boxes are next to the tills in the middle of the store.