Plastic pollution threat from soft contact lenses

MORE than 750million soft plastic contact lenses are polluting the environment each year after being thrown down the sink or dumped in a bin, it has been found.

Opticians’ chain Optical Express warned that 97 per cent of 800million contact lenses that are bought each year in the UK form microplastics when they break down, polluting the oceans and endangering marine life.

Its survey found that just 3 per cent of contact lenses are handed back to specialist recycling schemes available at opticians. While none of the manufacturers currently includes information on the environmental impact of their products on their packaging, Optical Express said last night that every pack of contact lenses it sells will now feature advice on how to properly dispose of them.

Stephen Hannan, clinical services director at Optical Express, said: ‘We’d suspected that some people were disposing of lenses down the drain, but it’s shocking to learn the true scale of the problem.

‘Everyone knows we need to take urgent action to reduce the amount of plastic we’re using in every aspect of our lives. It’s time we all took more responsibility for how our personal decisions affect the environment. We all have choices in terms of vision correction, whether that’s to wear glasses more often or get laser eye surgery, but whatever you do, don’t throw your contact lenses down the drain.’

Separately, a national sweet wrapper recycling scheme has been launched.

Waste collection firm Veolia said it would now offer a box scheme to collect sweet wrappers, straws or plastic toys that were previously considered unrecyclable.

The boxes will be available to the company’s customers that can be placed in public spaces.

It came as scientists warned that wrongly using a delicate cycle for everyday laundry is causing hundreds of thousands of extra microfibres to be released into water systems.

Millions of plastic microfibres are shed every time clothes that contain materials such as nylon, polyester and acrylic are washed. Because these fibres are so small, they drain out of the back of the washing machine and can ultimately enter the marine environment, where they can be ingested by tiny animals and end up in the food chain.

Researchers at Newcastle University found that although regular washing cycles cause the clothes to be bashed together more, the gentler programmes use more water which ‘plucks’ away more fibres from the material.