You’ve got to love it when someone presents you with a head-smackingly simple solution to a common problem, especially when it can help save the planet—and takes almost no effort.

One such idea was proposed to me recently by Robert Conway, a veteran optometrist from Rochester, N.Y. He has come up with an easy method for contact lens wearers to dispose of product packaging in an environmentally-responsible way.

“When I began practice in 1980, it was not uncommon for patients to keep one pair of contact lenses for one or two years,” Dr. Conway recalls. “Now we are promoting daily disposable contact lens wear, with no thought of what happens to the packaging. Plastic does not decompose, it does not go away. We live in a global environment, and there is no ‘away.’”

Dr. Conway points out that with the shift toward daily disposables, the eyecare industry is producing billions of pieces of plastic. “These pieces of plastic pollute the environment worldwide and are killing birds and marine animals that swallow them,” he asserts.

When Dr. Conway brings this to the attention of his patients, they often say that no one has ever told them about it, a response he calls “frightening.”

Dr. Conway notes that with most recycling programs across America, the top foil cover of the contact lens blister pack is not able to be recycled. Although the bottom part of the blister pack is recyclable, there’s a rub. With many cities going to single stream recycling, the small size is difficult to separate and ends up inside magazine pages or as litter.

Dr. Conway recommends putting the used blister packs into a plastic bottle that is going to be recycled anyway, then putting the sealed container into the recycling bin. “People want to save the planet, we just need to know how,” he concludes.

With smart, simple solutions like this, it may not be as hard as we think.

Andrew Karp
Group Editor, Lenses and Technology
[email protected]