The Dandenong Ranges local collecting “hundreds of thousands of blister packs” across the eastern suburbs

Diarne Kreltszheim says she’s recycled around 46 kilos of blister packs.

The Dandenong Ranges local has been tackling the huge amount of the thin, plastic and foil packages for years now.

She meets with anyone worth helping in parking lots across the eastern suburbs, gathering together plastic bags filled to the brim with blister packs destined for the tip.

“I took it upon myself to transport numerous boxes and plastic bags full of blister packs to my garage,” Diarne, who sorts through, cleans, repackages, and weighs the packages before sending them to a recycling centre, tells the Eastern Melburnian.

She estimates the total number she has processed is “hundreds of thousands of blister packs from the local area.”

If you take medicines or supplements, you almost certainly have a bunch of blister packs lying around. The thumb-pressed pill holders have become a part of modern living.

However, blister packs can’t just go straight into your recycling bin at home – it’s a tricky type of waste that needs special treatment. The sheets are composed of different materials stuck together and are difficult to process.

Most councils or recycling facilities don’t even accept them because they don’t have the appropriate equipment. Often, these packs just end up in sorting machines or polluting the environment.

Recycling blister packs involves collecting, sorting, shredding and melting the materials into plastic pellets or flakes, which can then be used to make new products such as park benches, watering cans, and garbage bins.

There are only a couple of companies in Australia which provide a recycling program and these are businesses, not charities.

Pharmacies purchase recycling boxes from these companies, with the cost of purchase covering the price of the box, transport of the box from and back to the recycling centre, the cost of recycling and customer support.

Diarne said she wanted to start fundraising to buy her own boxes to place in strategic points to make them more accessible, but the cost of ten was around $2200.

“I needed to fundraise but I was getting nowhere,” she said.

“No-one was really interested. Blister packs aren’t sexy.”

Diarne said she wanted more local councils to provide funding to buy more boxes to participate in disposal and more accessible drop-off points at places frequently visited by elderly people.

“People on pensions are the ones most likely to consume the most medication per capita, the cost of getting goods to these disposal points is left with those who are least able to afford it,” she said.

At the moment there are only a number of local pharmacies in Knox and the Dandenong Ranges where consumers are encouraged to physically drop off their blister packs at no cost.

Images Credit: Diarne Kreltszheim