Boots has launched the blister pack** programme in over 100 stores in London and the South East of England, with plans to roll it out to more stores in the UK next year.
Blister packs are made of plastic and foil for vitamins and medications and are not normally available for curbside collection at home**. Boots hopes this new initiative will lead to millions of used blister packs and divert them from landfills in the coming years.
The Blister Pack program is an extension of the popular Boots program, which rewards customers for placing empty health and beauty products that can't be at home into the boots' collection bins.
More than 700 stores across the UK have Recycle at Boots collection bins, which have sold more than 3.1 million products since its launch in 2020.
Customers near participating stores can now be rewarded for tossing used blister packs into dedicated collection bins**. Boots Advantage card holders will receive 15 Boots Advantage card points when they spend £10 or more in store.
The Boots program is brand agnostic, which means that customers can blister packs of any brand and track their condition as long as they have a Boots Advantage card.
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 what they do with their packaging after use.
Customers can now simply throw empty blister packs into the boots, ensuring that the materials will get a second life and be rewarded for doing so, just as they would throw away other hard-to-be-hard empty blister packs via the boots station. We will draw on the lessons learned from this initial pilot and hope to roll out the program more widely next year. ”
This latest blister pack program and the broader Recycle at Boots program are both carried out in partnership with technology partner Metrisk and partner MyGroup.
Once the blister packs or health and beauty empty boxes are sent to the Boots store, they are sent to mygroup, where they are separated using specialized machines, the metal foil is conventional**, since the aluminium can be infinite**, while the plastic is processed into a material called myboardTM for construction, furniture, etc.
In addition, Boots is taking steps to reduce the amount of plastic used in the products it sells. For example, it banned the sale of plastic wipes in 2022 and called on other retailers to follow suit.