Recycle your Contact Lenses

As an optometrist, I love to see my patients wearing daily contact lenses.  Your eyes are so important.  Why risk infections from bacteria that may come from the cases you clean them in?  Why not put a fresh pair of contacts on your eye every day?  Especially living in an area at high altitude and low humidity, where dryness is an issue for 90% of the people that walk through my office door, daily contact lenses are a great answer.  

But how do you dispose of the lenses?  Did you know that 15-20% of contact lens wearers flush their contacts down the toilet or the drain?  This creates 6-10 metric ton of plastic in the water treatment plants every year.  It is creating a micro-plastic pollution problem.  This plastic is so small that it gets through the filters meant to protect us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk5gHqg9NCU

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/science/contact-lenses-pollution.html

Throwing your contact lenses in the trash instead of flushing them is a much better alternative, but is it the only option?

We have partnered with Baush + Lomb and TerraCycle to recycle your contact lenses in their ONE by ONE Recycling Program.  We can recycle the boxes the lenses come in, the blister packs that store them, and the lenses themselves.  Use us as a collection site for these materials.  We then ship them to Baush + Lomb that breakdown and recycle each component of the contact lenses and their packaging.  For every ten pounds of recyclable waste we send them, B+L will make a donation to Optometry Giving Sight. 

Optometry Giving Sight is a nonprofit working to prevent blindness and impaired vision for those who do not have access to eye exams and glasses/contacts. You can find more information about their wonderful program on their website: www.givingsight.org.