Council teams up with Kettering pharmacy to launch medical blister pack recycling trial

It is not widely known that the packs – what your pills come in – contain a mixture of foil and plastic which should not be put in recycling boxes but can be recycled by specialists.

Now Kettering Town Council and Mill Road Pharmacy have teamed up to run a new scheme as an experiment to find out whether this would be a popular option for residents.

Terracycle – a company which is based in Slough – provide collection boxes which they take away and recycle the contents. Now one has been put in the Kettering pharmacy, on the corner of Mill Road and Windmill Avenue, for people to use.

Anil Patel from Mill Road Pharmacy said: “We are pleased to be able to help the recycling effort in Kettering and would encourage residents to leave their blister packs with us and not in the waste stream.”

Cllr Lloyd Bunday (Con), leader of the town council and chair of its finance committee which proposed the scheme, said: “It’s a surprise to many that medical blister packs are not suitable for putting in your household recycling.

"This is a way of seeing if we can encourage more people to recycle these items.

"We are very keen to see what the take up is going to be. We are really pleased that Mill Road Pharmacy has agreed to work with us on this.”