The Pharmacy Team at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust has banished plastic bags used for patients to carry medicines home and replaced them with recyclable paper bags.
Staff wanted to get rid of plastic where they could, and so a new paper bag has been sourced and designed to cut down on waste.
The Trust’s busy pharmacy uses over 1000 bags each week which equates to a lot of plastic waste during the course of a year. Previously, bulk orders were shipped from China, but to reduce carbon emissions, the paper bags are from a UK supplier. The new bags come in three different sizes which means a more appropriately sized bag will be used according to the amount of medicines going into them.