Wokingham and Woodley are two of the first towns in the country to benefit from a new recycling initiative.
Boots has launched a blister pack recycling pilot scheme in more than 100 stores in London and South East of England, and plans to roll out the scheme to more stores across the UK in the next year.
The blister pack recycling scheme is an extension of the popular Recycle at Boots initiative, which rewards customers for bringing empty health and beauty products that cannot be recycled at home to collection bins at Boots.
Four Boots stores in Berkshire – Wokingham Market Place, Reading Woodley, Bracknell The Lexicon Shopping Centre and Reading Calcot – will be among the first stores in the UK where customers can drop off their used blister packs for recycling in dedicated collection bins and get rewarded for it.
Boots Advantage Card holders will receive 150 Boots Advantage Card points when they recycle 15 empty blister packs and spend £10 or more in store.
Blister packs, which are made of plastic and foil and used for vitamins and medicines, cannot typically be recycled through household kerbside collections.
Boots hopes this new initiative will enable millions of used blister packs to be recycled and diverted from landfill over the next few years.
Natalie Gourlay, head of ESG at Boots, said: “At Boots we want to make it easy for our customers to make sustainable choices for a healthy planet – from the products they buy to how they dispose of the packaging once they have used them.
“Customers can now simply drop off their empty blister packs at Boots with the assurance that the materials will be given a second life and get rewarded for it too, just like they can when they drop off other hard-to-recycle empties through Recycle at Boots.
“We will be taking the learnings of this initial pilot on board as we look to roll the scheme out more widely within the next year.”
The new blister pack recycling scheme is part of the wider Recycle at Boots initiative, which is delivered using technology partner Metrisk and recycling partner MYGroup. The Recycle at Boots initiative is brand agnostic, meaning that customers can recycle blister packs from any brand and track their recycling, as long as they have a Boots Advantage Card.
To recycle blister packs, customers must create an account with Scan2Recyle, or login to their existing account, log empty blister packs into Scan2Recyle and wait for up to 24 hours until they are validated, then bring their empty packs into a participating Boots store and scan the QR code on the blister pack deposit box
To receive a reward of 150 Advantage Card points, customers must scan 15 empty blister packs in one deposit and spend £10 in store.
If they are depositing other hard-to-recycle health and beauty empties through Scan2Recycle, they will be rewarded 500 Advantage Card points when they scan five products and spend £10 in store.
After the blister packs or health and beauty empties have been dropped off at Boots stores, they are sent to MYGroup to be separated using a specialised machine, the metal foil is recycled conventionally, as aluminium is infinitely recyclable, while the plastic is processed into a useable form again, where possible, or made into a material called MYBoardTM to be used for construction, furniture and more.
Steve Carrie, group director at MYGroup, said: “We’re proud to announce this landmark scheme with Boots, taking our unique circular solution for blister pack recycling further into the mainstream.
“Thanks to our longstanding partnership with Boots, we already have the relationships, expertise and reach in place to recover such a widespread waste item at scale as the scheme rolls out.”
