Don’t get stuck with the Styrofoam! London Drugs offers industry’s first Styrofoam take-back recycling program.

Your beautiful new flat-screen TV is all set up and the big game is about to start. You just need to get rid of the pyramid of Styrofoam packing blocks in the middle of your living room. But how? You can’t put them in the blue box because the municipality doesn’t recycle polystyrene. If you somehow manage to cram them into your garbage can, you’ll have nowhere to store the rest of the week’s trash. You even contemplate stashing them in your trunk for a midnight dumpster run, like some subversive suburban Pulp-Fiction character. Then you smile, remembering that you bought your flat-screen at London Drugs and all you have to do is bring your Styrofoam back to the store to be recycled responsibly.

Right now, London Drugs is the only major retailer taking back Styrofoam for recycling, along with any other packaging that comes with purchases at their stores. In fact, in the last 18 months, they have prevented over 40 semi-truck loads of Styrofoam – some 50,000 lbs – from entering landfills. That’s no small task.

Expanded polystyrene, as Styrofoam is officially known, is a great packing material. It’s light, inexpensive and durable. But because it takes up so much space with so little weight, and takes thousands of years to break down, it is a challenge to landfills and recyclers alike. At a recent visit to Genesis Recycling, one of London Drugs’ responsible recycling partners, I learned more about the challenges of recycling Styrofoam, and the successes of the London Drugs program.

Styrofoam returned by customers is picked up at London Drugs stores and collected at the warehouse before shipping to Genesis. There, the Styrofoam blocks are ground up and compressed into polystyrene blocks, each about 1/40th the size of their original form. This makes them a commodity that is then shipped and sold to be remanufactured into new products. At this stage, though, Styrofoam recycling is certainly no money-maker.

“In its expanded form, polystyrene is very inefficient to ship.” Says London Drugs VP Clint Mahlman. “One whole semi-truckload only weighs about 1.5 tonnes. So it is very labour intensive to collect and ship for recycling. But we’re committed to making this program work, both for our customers’ convenience and the capacity of our landfills.”
So next time you’re thinking about purchasing appliances or electronics, remember London Drugs. And don’t get stuck with the Styrofoam.