Greater Geelong initiates blister pack waste recycling drive with Pharmacycle

The City of Greater Geelong has launched an innovative end-to-end recycling program to divert blister packs from landfills. In collaboration with the Rotary Club of Geelong East and recycling business Pharmacycle, the Rotary Club of Highton has installed 60 blister pack collection boxes in ten regional pharmacies.

Pharmacycle is the only program in Australia dedicated to responsibly recycling blister pack waste from local pharmacies. It collects discarded blister packs from registered pharmacies and puts them through mechanical recycling to separate the aluminium foil seal from the plastic blister. The process includes shredding, grinding, air-density separation, and electrostatic separation. The separated aluminium and plastic materials are kept in bulk bags and sent to end users.

"The idea to begin this initiative came from what we were seeing community members saying on social media," as was stated by the concerned parties.

"The community wants to recycle blister pack wastage and is a frequent topic of conversation in pharmacies," it was explained.

Ms Barb Sheehan, a member of the Rotary Club of Highton and a pharmacist with over four decades of experience, stated that this initiative is a first for the region.

Bard Sheehan elaborated: "This type of initiative hasn't been done in Geelong before, so we're really excited to see how this pilot program goes."

"Blister packs are a mix of foil and plastic, meaning they cannot go into the yellow bins, they can't be effectively recycled, and end up in landfill," she pointed out.

"With council funding, it will create awareness and measure how the community reacts. We will then revisit the City of Greater Geelong in a year's time to see if we can make this a permanent initiative," Sheehan concluded.

The Rotary's blister pack recycling pilot program was officially launched on July 14. It was made possible by the City of Greater Geelong's 2022-23 Environmental Sustainability Grants (Round Two), which allocated AU$ 10,000 to kickstart the project.

Collection boxes can be found in various pharmacies across the region, including Portarlington Pharmacy, Priceline Pharmacy East Geelong, Ocean Grove Terrace Pharmacy, Community Care Chemist in Newcomb, Geelong Soul Pattinson Pharmacy in Central Geelong, Pardeys Eastbrooke Pharmacy and Kardinia Pharmacy in Belmont, Peak Pharmacy Corio Central, Direct Chemist Outlet Highton, and Mitchell and O'Hara Pharmacy in Geelong West. Additionally, Pharmacycle has more than 200 collection points spread across Australia. For detailed information on the aluminium blister packaging collection drive, one can visit Pharmacycle's official website.

Other such organisations focusing solely on the 100% recyclability of aluminium are, PanelCycle, Podback and Solarcycle, which all have their individual and unique recycling techniques to extract aluminium to be used as raw material, inducing a circular economy and prompting a closed material loop.