Asthma Inhaler Take Back Scheme at The Co-operative Pharmacy
If you have a respiratory illness you can now recycle your inhalers at participating Co-operative Pharmacy branches as part of Complete the Cycle, a groundbreaking scheme which is being rolled out by GlaxoSmithKline in 272 Co-operative Pharmacies in Scotland, Wales and England.
There are more than five million people in the UK currently receiving treatment for asthma and other respiratory illnesses who rely on the use of inhalers, so the potential for recycling these products and reducing wastage is huge.
Approximately 20,000 respiratory inhalers have been recycled since the start of the pilot run by The Co-operative Pharmacy and GlaxoSmithKline, preventing the release of inhaler propellant, which is a greenhouse gas, into the environment.
The amount of propellant saved is equivalent to preventing the release of around 114 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). This is equivalent to the amount of CO2 that would be released by driving an average sized car around the world twenty times.*
What to do
Return any empty inhalers to a participating Co-operative Pharmacy.
It will be placed in a specially designed recycling box supplied by TerraCycle UK. The box will be returned to TerraCycle UK via courier when full. Once the inhalers reach the TerraCycle UK facility in Essex, they will be processed and sorted into material type. The plastics will remain on site for further processing, after which the recycled components will be sold on for use in new products.
*We used a VW Golf for calculation purposes, with engine 1.4TSI and carbon emission 144g/km. See VW Golf Emissions Statistics.
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