This article was written by Year 6 students, Alfie Cao and Jeremy Huang.
Blister packs are the packaging that are usually used to package our medication, or small consumer goods. These packs have a pre-formed plastic holder with an aluminium foil backing. They cannot be recycled in the same way as our usual recycling because they contain two different materials that are fused together – plastic and metal.
However, a Melbourne based company named Pharmacycle has come up with a way to deal with this issue. It accepts blister packs from the public, and uses a special machine to disengage and shred the blister packs into the two materials.
It is important that we recycle these blister packs because they are detrimental to the land and
Instead of leaving millions of pieces of packaging to be left slowly corroding in landfill and taking up space, we should recycle blister packs now when we have the chance to repurpose them for something greater.
The Environmental and Science Service Teams (two of the Year 6 Leadership Teams at Grimwade House) have joined forces to collect blister packs from our community to send to be recycled.
There are only around 220 collection points in Australia, mainly in pharmacies. We are establishing another for use by our own Grimwade House community. We will be asking Grimwade families to bring any empty blister packs they have around the house to the School and deposit them in our dedicated containers.
Once the containers are full, we will send them to Pharmacycle for recycling.
We are doing this to start a new era of recycling and, in doing so, we are trying to encourage the future of our planet to become more sustainable.
You can visit the Pharmacycle website for more information and to find out how you can contribute to this important action. pharmacycle.com.au
