Environment
At UFS we’re committed to reducing our impact on the environment and supporting our members and customers to also reduce theirs.
We appreciate that it’s the small things we do that contribute to the overall impact, so we’re investing in providing recycling services for empty medication blister packs, which would have normally gone to landfill and taken hundreds of years to break down.
UFS Pharmacies and Medical centres* are now collection points for empty medication blister packs to be recycled. Once these packs are collected, the foil and plastic are separated using a specialised process and then each component is recycled.
It’s important to remember that EMPTY packs only can be placed in these boxes and any unwanted or expired medication can be returned to the dispensary for disposal. Empty packs should not be packaged in bags or any other packaging prior to placing in the collection box.
*Where the UFS Medical centre is co-located with a UFS Pharmacy, the collection box will be located in the pharmacy.
The introduction of the blister pack recycling program follows several earlier initiatives in our sustainability program:
- Solar panels have been installed on all ten UFS owned buildings, including Central Office, Doveton Street Medical and our pharmacies at Ballan, Beaufort, Bridge Mall, Buninyong, Sturt Street and Wendouree.
- Sustainable cleaning products are used at all sites. These are purchased in concentrated form and diluted onsite, to reduce the amount of unnecessary packaging used.
- Environmentally sustainable LED lights have been installed at twenty of our sites.
- All sites are collection points for Zoos Victoria’s “They’re Calling on You” campaign to collect old mobile phones to help save gorillas in Africa.
- We offer safe disposal of unwanted/expired medicines for free in order to reduce our impact on the environment.
- We phased out single use plastic bags in all our stores prior to this being mandated and our paper bags are now printed on sustainably sourced paper, with water based inks.
