Daily use contact lenses - Don´t flush them away! Not a good idea!

I wear glasses for reading so do not wear contact lenses, I don´t fancy putting anything in my eye! but there are millions of people around the world who do wear them! I admit that it is real pain when my glasses fall off my nose when I bend down and in other pratical situations!  I came across this really interesting report about them.

                                                        

When you think of plastic pollution, you probably imagine discarded straws. And water bottles. And bags. Some people are also focusing on something smaller — teeny weeny items millions of us use everyday. Contact lenses, when improperly discarded, likely create contaminating microplastics.

To help prevent microplastic pollution, responsible disposal is important.

Don’t Flush Used Contacts

That’s the advice from a trio of scientists at Arizona State University. They teamed up to study the effect of contact lenses that are washed down the drain or flushed down the toilet.

The study reveals that:

• Fifteen to 20 percent of contact lens wearers dispose of the lenses down the sink or toilet.
• With an estimated 140 million people in the  world are wearing contacts, about 10.2 billion  lenses are flushed per year.
• At wastewater plants, contacts likely are too small to be filtered out and removed.

“The study showed that wastewater plants fragment them into microplastics, which accumulate in sewage sludge. For about every two pounds of wastewater sludge, a pair of contact lenses typically can be found,” according to an article about the project on Arizona State University’s website.

Tossing used lenses in regular trash is preferable to flushing, explains Charles Rolsky, a Ph.D. candidate who worked on the research project. Even better, recycle.

There are recycling services available in the US and the UK, but as of yet not here in Spain.  

In the UK there are two, below is one of them:

DROP-OFF LOCATIONS ONLY

The ACUVUE® Contact Lens Recycle Programme

                                                                                       

So until we have the choice of taking them to a place to safely dispose of them, they have to be thrown in with the ordinary rubbish into the green bins.  Maybe any of you that wear them could speak to the optician who you  buy them from and see if they can maybe get something up and running, unless this is already happening in Ciutadella and because I don´t use them I don´t know of it!

 The blog song for today is: " Chain Reaction" by Diana Ross

 

TTFN