Stories about circular systems, recovery infrastructure, and the future of responsible consumption.
14 billion contact lenses are thrown away in the US every year. Programs exist to recycle them, the technology works, and yet almost none of it gets recovered. Here's what's actually going on, and why the fix has nothing to do with awareness.
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A kitchen appliance company and a toothbrush company never compared notes with us, or with the laundry filter company we wrote about last time. All of them still landed on the same conclusion: recovery only works if it happens at the exact place and moment waste is created, not somewhere the person has to travel to later.
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After more than two years of research and 18 months of field testing, Closed Loop Partners and some of the world's biggest consumer brands proved that small-format plastic packaging can be recovered at industrial scale, cutting contamination by two-thirds. It is a major breakthrough. It also shows where the next layer of recovery has to begin: upstream, before the smallest and most challenging items ever reach the MRF.
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Only 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled. Not last year. Not in the last decade. Ever. That's not a material problem. It's a system problem. Here's where the system broke down.
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Countries that attach a small deposit to packaging don't just recycle more. They recycle almost everything. Here's the science behind that number, and why we used the same logic to build BlisterBucks.
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Myopia now affects 42% of North Americans, and rates are still climbing. If a child diagnosed today goes on to wear daily contact lenses full time for 50 years, they will generate over 36,000 blister packs. Nobody is talking about what that means for plastic waste, or what it means to develop good waste disposal habits early.
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The most effective sustainability products don't ask you to change your habits. They work because of the habits you already have. PlanetCare figured this out for laundry. We're doing it for contact lenses.
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A 2024 pilot program got ophthalmology clinics across the US collecting contact lens waste. Students volunteered. Departments said yes. Patients brought their lenses in. The results quietly revealed the biggest obstacle recycling programs still haven't solved.
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A major international study asked lens wearers across 16 countries how they throw away their contacts and packaging. Most people said they want to do the right thing. Almost none of them are.
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TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky has spent 25 years studying why waste goes where it goes. His TEDx talk is the clearest explanation we've found for why recycling keeps failing, and it has nothing to do with whether people care.
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Our first cohort has been using LensLoop for 18 months and counting. We checked in with two of them recently to ask what the experience has actually been like. Here's what they told us, in their own words.
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Contact lens blister packs are made from recyclable materials. The reason they don't get recycled has nothing to do with what they're made from. It's their size. Smaller than a credit card, they fall straight through the gaps in recycling machinery. A CooperCompanies senior director global strategy, innovation and sustainability explained exactly why on camera, and it's worth understanding before assuming the problem is close to being solved.
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