Photo: L.Craig
We occasionally get email from customers who are puzzled at the extra space in their bottle of London Drugs medications. This is one of those situations where the most effective environmental choice comes up against practicality in a calculation that can be a bit more complex than it first appears.
London Drugs buyers need to source packaging for a very wide range of medication quantities and sizes. But, as you can imagine, finding, ordering, packaging and shipping a wide array of bottle sizes drives up time and cost through the whole process. From an environmental perspective, it can also be more energy-efficient at the factory to produce fewer sizes of bottles, once set-up, start-up and shipping/packing materials are considered for each run. As well, for examples like the Melatonin pictured above, a bottle small enough to hold those 60 tablets snugly would not be big enough to display all of the ingredients and information – in both official languages.
So in order to keep our prices low, our team made the choice to go with three or four basic bottle sizes instead of over 30 bottle sizes. Which means that, unfortunately, for some products, there may be more air than we would like. It isn’t a perfect solution, and we will continue to work to find solutions that balance all the factors as best we can.
We do specify a readily recyclable #1PETE plastic for our bottles, and all medicine containers returned to our stores are recycled. So whatever their size, please Bring Back the Pack.
If you want to make a real environmental difference, please don’t forget to return unused medications. Flushing them down the toilet does not really get rid of them, as our waste treatment systems are not designed to break down these complex compounds. As a result, fish stocks can be adversely affected. (Read more on our blog here)
In the meantime, we do appreciate customers keeping the pressure on for us to do better. And we will keep working from our end to monitor our bottling system and choices.
