If you find yourself with a pile of empty medication bottles at the end of each month, you're likely thinking of ways to get rid of them. Unfortunately, medication bottles are difficult to recycle, as only some facilities take them because they are #5 plastic, meaning they are hard and heat-resistant.
One pet owner, who faced the difficulty of six empty pill bottles at the end of each month, sought advice from the subreddit r/AnimalShelterStories.
"My current foster is on six different medications," they wrote. "So we have six empty bottles every month."
The OP heard about animal shelters reusing the bottles and asked: "Can shelters actually reuse the empty bottles?"
The scoop
The answer was an overwhelming "yes!"
One Redditor said that they reuse empty bottles at their shelter.
"It's best if you can remove the labels at least first. You can always call them beforehand and see if it's something they need," they explained.
Another Redditor mentioned that they compile their bottles and then return them in a big bag with everything else required for fostering.
"I have a collection of bottles," they wrote.
How it's helping
Due to the difficulties in recycling these bottles, numerous tips for how to reuse them pervade social media. Solutions such as these, that don't involve using them for anything, are still helpful ways to repurpose the bottles so that they don't end up in landfills.
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It's about time! ✅ In the U.S., 194 billion prescription pill bottles are used each year, with a majority of them ending up in landfills.
Cabinet Health, a company working to reuse pill bottles, stated that the traditional amber pill bottles "make up a majority of all plastic pill bottles in the U.S." and that they "are not generally accepted by curbside recycling programs, contributing the same amount of waste roughly equivalent to filling more than 3,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools."
Plastic landfill waste takes hundreds of years to biodegrade and contributes to the growing problem of microplastics seeping into our air, water, and soil.
What everyone's saying
Redditors were in agreement, the majority of animal shelters reuse the bottles.
"My shelter uses them to have smaller bottles for different medications or mixing things in them. Pills and cough syrup bottles work well for us," one wrote. "Shelters need so many more things than people realize."
Another simply stated, "I donate mine to my vet. She reuses them."
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