Amy Pigott How much energy is your pharmacy using each day? As a pharmacy owner, you might not know just how much you are using but with careful reflection, you can ensure that you learn more about your business. Do you know how many trees are cut down in the running of your business every day? Did you know that almost 10% of the manufactured medication packaging is wasted? You don’t have to worry about this usually but if you are trying to run a more sustainable business, this is something you really do need to consider.
If you own a pharmacy right now, then you have to do what you can to ensure that your experience is a positive one while the experience you give the environment is also positive. If you want to be more eco-friendly with your pharmacy, the best thing that you can do is check out our tips on how you can make sure that you are!
- Consider your lighting. A pharmacy needs to have adequate lighting. Not only do you need to find the right medications and the right pharmacy blister packs for those meds to go in, you have to ensure that your customers know where the sales are. The right lighting that is provided by LED bulbs will ensure that you can save money on your energy bills and do well for the environment at the same time.
- Always invest in the right packaging. We talked about pharmacy blister packs already but it’s important that everything from your carrier bags to your packaging is in eco-friendly packaging. You want to avoid excess waste where you can and that means the use of recycled paper products should be on your radar. You should work with suppliers that package medications in bulk, too, so that you can reduce the amount of waste you have. This saves you a lot of cash in the long run in your pharmacy.
- Consider your location. The building in which your pharmacy is located has to be as eco-friendly as possible if you want to be better for the environment. Installing a HVAC system that’s highly efficient will help you to generate better things for the environment. Purchasing the right furniture that has been made from sustainable materials and choosing bamboo and cork will help your pharmacy to stand out, too.
- Promote eco-friendliness in your store. You need to have medication recycling programs, packaging programs and more to encourage your customers to do it, too. You want to keep excess medications and chemicals out of landfills and you can bet that there have been chemicals found in wastelands and water. Urging people to recycle packaging where possible is doing better for the environment all around. Collecting pill containers and redoing blister packs will help you to cut down how much waste is in the environment, which is precisely the point.
- Try to fill prescriptions long term. If you can offer longer term supplies, you’ll cut down how much plastic is required. Don’t forget, all of the paper packaging that comes with each filled prescription will need to be recycled all over again and all of this will work to save you both time and money.
- Lean into auto-fill. There will be customers who need auto fill options for their medications and you should ensure that you do this to reduce the build up of unused medications for your customers. This will reduce how much medication is built up in your pharmacy for your customers. You can then ensure that your patients get what they need as they need it. Implementing just a few of these options will ensure that you save money and make sure that your pharmacy is far more eco-friendly all in the same process.
Other ways that you can ensure that you are more energy efficient is to go green with your logistics. Using alternative fuels in delivery vehicles and ensuring that you are using reusable materials for shipping instead of those single-use packages, you will start to take down your carbon footprint. If you use greener technologies, you will reduce your waste and save your business money. Not only that, but being a business that leads by example will help more and more people to be more efficient and understand that you are an eco-friendly pharmacy, too. Instead of having more of an impact on the environment, you’re going to be doing well for it for a change – and that’s what your business needs!
