New Medicine Blister Pack Recycling Scheme

A new recycling scheme for medicine blister packs has just started. There are now four different locations you can now take your empty blister packs. 

They are Trinity Church, Uncle Sid's Zero Waste Store, and the Mayfly cafe, all in the High Street, and The Olive Centre, next to the library in Clapham Road.

The scheme is a Most Easterly Community Group initiative, called Use It All, supported by Lowestoft Town Council. It's very much a pilot scheme, designed in part to estimate need.

Uncle Sid's Facebook page has already got many positive remarks about the scheme, including “Brilliant. We bring mine in”, “Oh, fabulous”, “So pleased you have this now”

“Medicine blister packs are notoriously difficult to recycle. Use It All's scheme collects them, and then they go to a factory in Hull who recycle them - making garden furniture and other items” said Use It All's John Ellerby.

He went on “The country's drowning in medicine plastic packaging. At least quarter of a billion paracetamol packs are sold in every year in the UK. Another 150 million spew out of the NHS. But there are NO reliable figures. All we do know is that the numbers are huge. 

“Hardly ANY get recycled. It's a recycling scandal.”

Most of the packs are composite - made from two materials - plastic and metal foil. This makes them difficult to economically recycle. There's few schemes which even attempt it.

As well as Use It All's pilot scheme, Boots Store in London Road North has just started their own scheme. 

All-metal/foil packs (it's vital they are all metal) CAN be put in your Blue Bin, according to Suffolk County Council

If you cannot get to any collection point, they must go in your black general waste bin.