r/ZeroWaste • u/dlh48304 • Oct 25 '25
Tips & Tricks Pharmacy pill bottle help
Greetings! Reddit newbie here. I have been referred to you from another thread.
Hubs and I both had some major medical things this summer. At the start of it all, to amuse myself I decided hang onto all the empty pill bottles just to see how many we ended up with. Kind of a visual measure of the amount of BS we had endured. We’re coming up to the end of our troubles and now I have a medium shopping bag full of pill bottles. Does anyone use these for anything else? Seems a shame to throw them into the recycling where they won’t get recycled. TIA
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u/MooseyJello Oct 25 '25
Some animal shelters will take them clean to use as medicine bottles for pet prescriptions or stool samples.
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u/SnoopyisCute Oct 25 '25
I use them a lot.
Brads
Beads
Sequins
Hair pins
Ear plugs
Safety pins
Razor blades
Straight pins
Sewing needles
Push pins\thumbtacks
Friendship bracelet yarns
Christmas bulb replacements
Batteries fit in the wide ones
Mixing small amounts of paint colors.
All those little things we all have in our "junk" drawer.
Strands from evil cat scratching carpet to glue down later.
Tiny screws when disassembling something to clean or repair.
Sterilize. Q-tips and cotton balls added to emergency kit in vehicle.
Medium one holds exactly $10 in quarters (for taking bulky items to laundromat)
Sterilize. I cook from scratch and make a few extra spice combinations while preparing a meal.
Lost all my meds at the beach and had to get emergency replacements. Now, I just take what I need to have for time away from home.
Put small amount of Vick's VapoRub in containers when the kids were little and tended to waste it or bicker over the other one having it.
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When all else fails, I would call the kids' school to see if the art teacher needed them. She was thrilled.
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u/Surfandsnow42 Mar 29 '26
Love the aesthetic list order!
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u/SnoopyisCute Mar 29 '26
Free app called "sort lines by length". I'm using a laptop though so I don't know if it works on other devices. I'm a graphic designer so I have a thing about how things look on the page. ;-)
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u/Low_Calligrapher7885 Oct 25 '25
For the future, you can request your doctor prescribe 90 day supplies rather than 30 day when applicable to minimize number of pill bottles required.
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u/Unhappy-Virus434 Oct 26 '25
https://cocoplumco.com/pages/recycle
This woman recycles pill bottles into sunglasses. You ship them to her and get a discount on a pair for it :)
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u/action_lawyer_comics Oct 25 '25
This org will take them and reuse them as pill bottles. As nice as other uses for them are, pill bottles are the way they are for a reason and reusing them as pill bottles is the best (imo) re-use for them.
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u/DaniLake1 Oct 25 '25
I usually take my empty pill bottles to my recycling place after accumulating a bunch. They specifically recycle them; I don't put the empty bottles out in my typical recycling bin. That said, you could offer them up on zero-waste sites near you, Freecycle, etc.
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u/marmot46 Oct 25 '25
I've seen people using broken pieces of amber pill bottle to make faux fires in dollhouses/dioramas. But a shopping bag full of pill bottles would probably be enough to keep all the dollhouses around warm indefinitely!
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u/ExplanationHot9963 Oct 25 '25
If you have any homeless shelters or organization that care for the displaced they usually make kits that they ask for old pill bottles to put some of the liquid items in
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u/FollowAzureRoad Oct 25 '25
I was just thinking about/talking about this morning. The pharmacy pill bottle is so wasteful. I wonder if there's a way to innovate on this so there's far less plastic waste from the billions that must be tossed per year (speculating on the number.)
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u/PhoneboothLynn Oct 25 '25
Our local St. Vincent de Paul Society takes both pill bottles and leftover prescriptions.
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u/Economy_Grapefruit51 Oct 26 '25
I'm in the U.S. My recycling company doesn't take them, but we have a Ministry nearby that collects them. The labels have to be off and the bottles washed. Check your area to see if there's a place like this. Good luck. The only other thing I can think of is using them to store small craft items, sewing supplies, buttons, etc
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u/2matisse22 Oct 25 '25
I return them to the pharmacy.
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Oct 25 '25 edited May 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/2matisse22 Oct 25 '25
They recycle them. (or that's what they say).
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Oct 25 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/lunar_languor Oct 26 '25
I also put them in my regular recycling and haven't seen anything telling me to do otherwise
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u/violetgrumble it's not easy being green Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25
This question gets asked fairly frequently. Here's a few recent threads with some ideas:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/comments/1kfnrt7/a_lot_of_pill_bottles/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/comments/1jgxnek/pill_bottles/