Spectacle Recycling for the Optical Industry and Local
Authorities

Spectacle Recycling and RecycLine.

RecycLine offer spectacle recycling for the optical industry. When you’re ready to start your campaign we’re here to help. We recover and reuse all plastic and metals, with zero waste. If you would like to join The National Spectacle Recycling Scheme you can order an End of Life Spectacle Frame Collection Box Here.

Businesses have been turning to Recycline since 2016. When we first began working alongside the optical industry we discovered that up until that point end of life frames had nowhere to end their lives other than in landfill.

We are proud to say that since we took over and became the only recyclers of waste frames in the UK we have successfully diverted more than 500 tonnes of this waste away from landfill sites and back into the circular economy.

That would have been a staggering amount of waste, equal to around 20 million individual pairs of glasses, or the equivalent of approximately 600 medium sized vans loaded to the roof, and all just dropped into UK soil. We’re happy to say that has been avoided.

Recycline’s bespoke approach to the optical waste problem from day one has been to separate the mixed plastics and metals, allowing the individual materials to be put back into industry as a raw material rather than go to landfill, or more worryingly polluting our waterways, oceans and seas and becoming a burden on the environment.

But that is not the only benefit to the separating and reusing of these materials. The environmental impact from the mining and manufacturing of new raw materials cannot be overstated. Mining new metals alone introduces 80% more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared to recycled metals, and then there is the carbon footprint of transportation of these materials.

It was thanks to the environmental conscientiousness of Vision Aid Overseas, (VAO) a charitable organisation that we used to work alongside, who requested that a sustainable solution was created for this waste. We developed a bespoke solution that is still to this day one of a kind, not just in the UK, but globally.

We continue to work with a number of organisations within the optical industry and the wider sector at large to fill the gap created by a number of organisations that closed their recycling scheme following guidance and insight from the WHO Vision 2020 report.

The process we use to separate and recover the materials was designed in house and is reportedly the only operation of its kind in the world, which has given us opportunities to receive frames from the UK, as well as Europe and beyond, to process with our state-of-the-art technologies. And the operation is funded entirely by the sale of the recovered materials, allowing us to donate a proportion of profits to charities to help with local and international causes.

We work alongside a number of companies and charities directly and indirectly, large and small, independent opticians being as much of an important contributor as the multinational entities such as FCC Environmental, Specsavers, VisionExpress, Chichester Lions Club, myOptique Group, Sunglasses Shop, Glasses Direct and DX Delivery.

Unfortunately, the pandemic was a difficult time for everyone, and between the middle of 2020 and the start of 2022 we received around 50% of the quantities we would usually have expected to process for that period. And although much of the reduction in receipts may be due to lack of access to local opticians, it must be assumed that a proportion of this missing quantities have found their way into household bins and council waste sites.

But we have been busy developing a nationwide scheme that we launched at the beginning of May 2022. This scheme will continue to raise funds for those same charitable causes, but it will also continue to ensure that on our watch not a single pair of spectacle frames that enter our facility is thrown away.

When you’re ready to start your campaign we’re ready to help. Click to learn more about the scheme, to get in touch or sign up to The National Spectacle Recycling Scheme.

If you are a private individual you can just forward on your unwanted spectacles to us by getting in touch, or check our Recycling Locations page for details of drop off locations and promotions at a participating opticians near you.