How We’re Reducing Plastic Waste in the Acupuncture Industry

Have you ever paused in the supermarket’s vegetable aisle, hand hovering above a plastic bag of carrots? Do these really need to be in plastic? Or perhaps you’ve bought a toothbrush, or some individually wrapped snacks, and felt dejected by the sheer amount of plastic that mounts up. We’re all hyper-aware of plastic waste and it can be incredibly frustrating when brands sell us products wrapped in this stuff while offering no way of dealing with it. 

As a brand that works with many clinically necessarily disposable products, we’ve felt this frustration too. It’s why we created our Eco range of acupuncture needles that have a 5-year shelf life and have multiple needles in one blister sharing a single guide tube instead of having one guide tube per needle. 

But it’s not enough. 

Guide tubes are made from plastic, an ideal material for them, but these tubes are disposable. Knowing that hundreds of thousands of these tubes are ending up in landfill every year didn’t sit right with us, so we’ve been trying to find ways to reduce this wastage.

Brand responsibility

Many brands place the responsibility onto the customer by asking you to source local recycling options. As these options vary from council to council, and no council specifies acupuncture guide tubes in their guidelines, we didn’t want to lumber you with dealing with our problem. 

Instead, we’ve come up with an easy way for you and us to recycle acupuncture guide tubes. The Acuprime Recycling Project makes it as straightforward as possible for you to get those tubes back to us for recycling and when you do, we’ll even send you a free box of needles. 

Recycle plastic acupuncture guide tubes

Here’s how the scheme works: 

1. Order your acupuncture needles as usual either online or by calling us on 01392 829 500. 
2. Find a spare box: cardboard boxes from other deliveries are great but even takeout boxes can work. Start collecting your used guide tubes in the box. 
3. When you’ve collected between 220g and 300g of guide tubes, give us a call or email us at info@acuprime.com to arrange a completely free collection of your box.
4. Cut out the labels from your needle boxes and place them in with the guide tubes. This allows us to see which needles the tubes were from, and arrange a free box of the same to be sent out to you. 
5. Stick the return labels we’ll provide onto your box and hand it over to the courier.
6. We’ll be in touch when we receive your box to offer a free box of needles. 

Working together like this allows us to take those used guide tubes off your hands and off your mind. We arrange recycling and you can continue your acupuncture practice, knowing that you’re helping to reduce plastic waste in this industry.  

See your plastic guide tubes in the future

When your guide tubes reach us, we send them off to a recycling company that’s expert in breaking down plastics and recycling them into outdoor products. Who knows, perhaps in the future you’ll buy a product made from recycled plastics and your guide tubes will be part of that process!

Thanks for being a part of our efforts to reduce plastic waste. As we recycle any and all guide tubes bought from us and returned to us, you can shop any of our acupuncture needles and know your guide tubes will be part of this important project. For more information, head to our recycling page. 

Shop our acupuncture needles today.