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Angel Eyes Vision Recycles Contact Lens Waste!
We’ve become accustomed to recycling cardboard boxes, aluminum cans, plastic water bottles, magazines and other items that we once threw in the trash. Have you considered recycling your old contact lenses? Contact lenses can be recycled! But disposing of your contacts in an eco-friendly manner isn’t as simple as tossing them into a recycling bin.
The following are ways you shouldn’t dispose of contact lenses:
- Don’t put contact lenses down the drain! It is estimated that 15-20% of wearers are flushing their old contacts down the toilet or washing them down the sink. It is reported that 2 billion lenses are being flushed every year. That’s a lot of plastic trash! Contact lenses don’t biodegrade easily because they’re medical devices that are designed to be durable. Flushing contact lenses is particularly concerning because their size and flexibility allow them to slip through filters meant to keep nonbiological waste out of wastewater treatment plants.
- Don’t mix contact lenses with the rest of your garbage- old contact lenses don’t belong in the same trash bag as your expired yogurt and other discarded food. While adding contact lenses to your everyday trash means that plastic won’t flow into our water systems, it’s still being dumped at a landfill. That’s no better than flushing your contact lenses.
- Don’t put contact lenses in the regular recycling bin- Contact lenses themselves shouldn’t join bottles, cans and other recyclables at your house. Due to their tiny size and packaging materials, recycling facilities typically cannot handle contact lens processing, so they are diverted to landfills.
Continue reading to learn how you SHOULD dispose of your contact lens trash!
B&L One by One Contact Lens Recycling - Terracycle
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In 2016, Bausch + Lomb teamed up with TerraCycle, a handler of hard-to-recycle waste, to create the ONE by ONE Recycling Program. The program is designed to recycle contact lenses, blister packs and blister-pack foil. As of April 2019, the recycling program had diverted more than 9.2 million used contacts, blister packs and foil from waterways, landfills and traditional recycling facilities.
How does the ONE by ONE program work? Once you’ve collected your old contacts, blister packs and foil, you can pick one of two recycling paths:
- Bring your contact lens waste to us at ANGEL EYES VISION!!! Our offices proudly support B&L’s contact lens recycling program!
- Ship it to TerraCycle. If you take the shipping route, you’ll place the waste in a sealed cardboard box and then drop off the box at a UPS location or schedule a pickup from your home.
You don’t need to wash the contact-lens waste before you recycle it, but you should be sure the blister packs are free of liquid. “Once received, the contact lenses and blister packs are separated and cleaned,” according to Bausch + Lomb. “The metal layers of the blister packs are recycled separately, while the contact lenses and plastic blister pack components are melted into plastic that can be remolded to make recycled products.”
Fortunately, the program accepts used contact lenses and other contact-lens recyclables from any manufacturer, not just Bausch + Lomb. For every qualifying shipment weighing at least 2 pounds, Bausch + Lomb will donate $1 per pound to Optometry Giving Sight, a global fundraising initiative that seeks to prevent blindness and impaired vision.
Think of recycling your contact lenses as a “win-win” with little effort on your part. Your contact lenses and their packaging are recycled, and you’re helping programs to prevent blindness. Where does it all go? Your contacts and packaging are turned into “a variety of post-consumer products, such as recycled picnic tables and garden beds,” Amy Butler, vice president of global environment, health, safety and sustainability at Bausch Health, said in 2018.