Recycling flexible plastics in BC: take them to London Drugs

First published on March 10, 2019

If you’re a Metro Vancouver resident, chances are that you bring your own re-usable shopping bags to the store. You might even bring your own re-usable produce bags. Then at home, between the compost, paper recycling, container and hard plastic recycling, and plastic bag recycling (back at the grocery store), what remains in your garbage can is mostly other plastics (and, especially during allergy season, tissues).

Now there’s a place for all that other plastic. In our house, that other plastic includes frozen fruit packaging, baby food stand-up pouches, crinkly snack bags such as chips, granola bar wrappers, bubble wrap envelopes, and much more.

London Drugs now accepts what they call flexible plastic packaging. That’s of course in addition to all the other things they accept such as Brita filters and batteries. In its blog post about the flexible plastic packaging program, it mentions all of the examples of packaging they accept. I find the flexible plastic packaging versus soft plastic packaging distinction a bit confusing, but there are a lot of items in the list, and in the comments section, they do their best to answer consumer questions.

The post also states that the collected plastics will be used for recycling research and development. In other words, the material won’t necessarily be recycled yet. For now, at least it’s being kept out of the dump with the long-term goal of recycling more of it.

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This entry is filed under Environment and written by Peter Keung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.