Recycling medical packaging

The Leader of Portsmouth City Council would appreciate the help of any pharmacies that are prepared to consider this voluntary recycling scheme concerning medicines packaging.

Green initiatives are a consistent and relevant topic and this scheme does seem to be well organised.

Thoughts to consider:

• Some care would need to be exercised around waste processing. There could be an advantage in that even if patients return medicines still in the blister, then this is still a benefit to patients as there is less un-needed medicines within people's homes.
• Pharmacies maybe generating large amounts of de-blistered packaging if they produce DDS/Nomad blisters for patients. If they pay for waste disposal proportional to how much is produced, free collection could be better?
• The pharmacy will receive points depending on how much waste is collected during the scheme and then the points are turned into donations for charity organisations.

The following link below provides details of how the scheme runs. The pictures on the Terracyle website could lead one to believe that only dulco~ products are included, but under the 'What you can recycle in this programme' heading it does state "Any brand of EMPTY medicine blister packets."

• https://www.terracycle.com/en-GB/brigades/medicine-packet-uk

Action:

Please consider this green inititative scheme for your pharmacy and share the details with your pharmacy team. Perhaps one of the team will wish to champion this?