A Lockerbie woman has vowed to take bin bags of pharmaceutical blister packs to Holyrood in a bid to highlight recycling shortfalls.
Cheryl McCormack made the pledge after the only UK processor of the pill packs pulled out after apparently being inundated.
Now the campaigner has called for the pharmaceutical industry to help address the problem and stop the packaging being sent to landfill.
Cheryl told the Standard: “People probably don’t realise how much of a problem this is and either just put the packs in the general waste or in plastic recyclables without realising.”
Terracycle UK launched a free blister pack recycling service in January, in partnership with stomach medicines labels Dulcolax and Buscopan.
It provided a bin service in pharmacies where packages could be dropped for recycling.
Cheryl spearheaded a bid to collect the packages from across Dumfries and Galloway after it emerged that the nearest collection point was in Carlisle.
She used social media to recruit an army of volunteers who collected the packs in their area and supermarket giant Morrisons agreed to host a collection bin.
But Cheryl, who already has 12 bin bags of the packs in storage, was left outraged after finding that the recycling operation was being halted.
She said: “I have been heading a massive campaign in Dumfries and Galloway to recycle these packs. I took it on single-handed and I’ve got nearly 50 collection points.
“It took me nearly four months because Dumfries and Galloway is such a vast rural area so it’s really hard to get everywhere covered but now I’ve even got people who provide collection points at their own houses, in their garage.”
She added: “I spent all day on Thursday from morning to midnight contacting MSPs and I have emailed Nicola Sturgeon. This is a massive problem. Pharmaceutical companies are going to have to be made to sit up and take notice as well. There must be a better way to do this than package in something which can’t be recycled.
“The support I have had from Dumfries and Galloway has been phenomenal and I’m willing to take this all the way to Holyrood.”
A spokesman for Terracycle told the Standard they had to close the blister pack recycling operation after the pilot proved so successful it couldn’t be supported by available funding.
He said: “We appreciate the time and effort the residents in Dumfries and Galloway have dedicated to the recycling of used medicine packaging and understand their disappointment.
“We and our partners Dulcoease®, Dulcolax® and Buscopan® launched the Medicine Packet Recycling Programme earlier this year for any private household to recycle their used medicine blister packets from any manufacturer.
“While we would love to recycle all medicine blister packets, regardless of source, we need to have a rethink and redesign of the programme’s infrastructure and funding that would accommodate the recycling of the large volumes we see coming in across the country. We’re passionate about continuing this effort and are actively exploring alternative collection models that would be better suited to answer the wider recycling need.”
