Niki Watts, pharmacist owner and IP at Vale of Neath Pharmacy in Glynneath, Wales, tells Saša Janković how a recycling initiative has increased footfall for his services. Reducing our environmental impact has become a core part of our business, and tackling the amount of waste we were sending to landfill is integral to this. We also had a number of customers – and patients from the GP surgery we are attached to – coming in with bags full of empty blister packs and asking us if there was a way to recycle them, as blister packets are not recycled by local councils. I did some research and found that Terracycle runs an Empty Medicine Blister Packs Zero Waste Box scheme so we signed up for that.

TerraCycle has partnered with biopharmaceutical company Sanofi, the maker of Buscopan and Dulcolax, to launch a new initiative that allows consumers to recycle their empty medicine blister packs. The ‘Little Packs, Big Impact’ initiative allows consumers in the UK to recycle any empty prescription and over-the-counter medicine blister packets for free by dropping them in dedicated bins when they visit a local participating pharmacy.