How you are helping the environment by getting lens treatment

Have you ever considered how many contact lenses you have gone through in your life time?

Let’s do a quick test, for fun…

• If you started wearing contact lenses at the average age of 14 and you decided to wear them daily;
• that would equal to 730 contact lenses you wear, for BOTH eyes in one year minus the 10 days you decided not to wear them);
• you would end up with 720 contact lenses.
• You have been wearing contact lenses for 40 years. That would be 720 x 40
• Can you guess what it estimates to?
  =28,800

That’s 28,800 contact lenses that you have gone through in your life time so far.

From last year’s statistics, it is said that 3.5 million people in the UK wear contact lenses, and the majority of them are daily wearers.

If they were all daily contact lens wearers, the sum would look like this:

Disposable contact lenses are typically made of silicone-hydrogel, and are also very small, which makes it impossible for machines to recycle (don’t even get us started on the plastic packaging!). This means when you dispose of them, they have no other place to go other than our oceans/landfills.

Have you ever considered which vision is polluting the environment more: Glasses or contact lenses?

One year’s supply of daily disposable lenses (730 lenses) produces 9.125 grams of plastic.

But arguably, one pair of glasses produces approximately 35 grams of plastic (which equals to almost four years’ worth of daily disposable contacts)

Glasses, however, do not require as much plastic packaging compared to the amount contacts lenses do.

How can your choice in vision aid help the planet?

Have you ever considered how laser eye surgery/lens replacement treatment can be an eco-friendly alternative?

If you were to get lens replacement surgery, you would only need to require one artificial lens in each eye, for the rest of your life.

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Written by Gareth Hargreaves• July 12, 2018