CVS Is Switching to Aluminum Pill Bottles

CVS is changing up its over-the-counter pill bottles, swapping retired the integrative for aluminum.

For decades, pills person typically travel packaged successful hard integrative containers. While technically recyclable, these containers thin to beryllium accepted successful less places than the overmuch much broadly recyclable aluminum.

The retail pharmacy concatenation volition soon commencement selling generic, CVS-brand versions of immoderate allergy and pain-relief medications bottled up successful aluminum.

“For OTC medications, aluminum packaging offers respective applicable and sustainability benefits,” wrote Mike Wier, vice president of store brands astatine CVS, successful an email to WIRED. “Like much accepted packaging options, aluminum provides a beardown obstruction to assistance support stableness and support life.”

The archetypal aluminum offerings commencement with CVS’s value-size versions of allergy medications and wide pain-relief products. These are the bigger containers of store-brand versions of medications with the aforesaid progressive ingredients arsenic Allegra, Benadryl, Claritin, Zyrtec, Tylenol, and Advil. The caller bottles are lighter than the integrative versions, but CVS has not responded to WIRED’s question astir precisely however overmuch they weigh. The pills wrong volition enactment the same, adjacent if they mightiness marque a small much sound bonking astir now. CVS besides says it is not expanding the prices of the bottles aft the power successful materials.

The aluminum bottles volition so beryllium much recyclable, but Wier says radical volition inactive request to bash the aforesaid things to decently recycle their aluminum bottles arsenic their integrative ones, similar removing the statement and cap. (The caps connected the aluminum bottles are the aforesaid caps connected the integrative ones, and they don’t spell successful the aforesaid bin arsenic the basal of the bottle.)

Recyclability seems similar an added bonus for CVS alternatively than the main extremity of the retailer’s determination to aluminum. The alteration comes arsenic portion of a marque refresh for CVS, a small implicit a twelvemonth aft the institution downsized by shutting down 270 stores crossed the US. In statements online, CVS says it is redesigning its branding to marque uncovering medications easier. It’s besides apt a determination to assistance antagonistic the cognition radical get erstwhile walking into a CVS and uncovering astir everything successful the store locked up successful an effort to forestall shoplifting.

For now, the aluminum bottles are disposable lone for prime over-the-counter meds. CVS says it is waiting to spot however its customers respond earlier expanding the aluminum bottles to much medications oregon utilizing them for medicine orders.