What was wrong with glass pill bottles?

WHEN I was young, tablets came in small bottles with screw-on tops. Pills of all sizes could be despatched and ingested from the comparative simplicity of the glass container.

In itself, this was fabricated from processed sand and therefore exerted neither strain nor drain upon the environment.

The older I get, the more reliant I find I have become upon special doctor-prescribed life-supportive drugs dispatched in capsule form.

The only problem is that today’s society has eschewed the environmentally-friendly glass bottle (made of sand, remember?) in favour of a printed cardboard box containing strips of plastic sheet bonded to silver foil between which are imprisoned vital caplets of ingestible life-prolonging chemical.

To my way of thinking, this adds expense and complexity to what was originally a very simple procedure, namely the distribution of pills.

The residue of today’s pollutive boxes ends up either as landfill or eventually inside our fish. As for the metallic foil, this comes off in discs that adhere to the surface of the capsule.

I cannot imagine how many of these small silver baubles I have, over the years, accidentally swallowed along with their packed tablets. It is a possible cause for concern that that they probably do not do one’s digestion much good.

While the prescription of pills for this sort of packing, and the process of encapsulating the whole for neat and impeccable stacking on the shelves of the chemist, must provide employment for goodly number of people, might I respectfully suggest that the result is of restricted benefit. I would urge that we go back to the old system.

It worked well for those many, many years before we invented plastic, and it did not provide residue which could not be absorbed back into the welfare of our planet.

Although it is clearly some years too late now, might I offer the sentiments expressed so aptly in that simplistic saying which, I believe, is attributed to our friends across the water in the Land of Trump: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Arthur W J G Ord-Hume

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