A growing concern among many acupuncturists is the volume of packaging in which our needles are enclosed.
For all the safety and health reasons you can imagine, that packing must meet stringent standards for sterility, and until now, I’ve been using brands which use non-recyclable packs.
The good news is that one of my suppliers has introduced a brand which claims recyclable packaging. There are ten needles and only one guide tube in each sealed, sterile little pouch instead of one tube and one needle per pack. It’s these little pouches which can be recycled. I’ll be dropping mine off at my local supermarket whenever I take a bag of ‘soft plastics’ to be recycled.
Other recyclables in today’s shipment include cardboard boxes and big, scrunched up sheets of packing paper. I love this type of paper; I use it for warm-up sketches and gestural sketching or I recycle it for packing. The needle box really is dainty; 1000 needles in a box that with the ‘old style’ packaging would only fit 200!
Other important considerations I had when choosing this new brand are the claims made about manufacturing standards, which I accessed here. For any AHPRA Registered practitioner these standards are critical.
The other consideration is of course, comfort. I tried a few of these on myself and was very happy with insertion and removal, both as practitioner and recipient.
And what about safe needle disposal and the other consumables I use for each person, and infection control in general? These are the guidelines Australian Acupuncturists must follow. Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Healthcare (2019)
Note: Neither this post nor I are sponsored by my supplier or needle manufacturer and there are no affiliate links.
Margi Macdonald 
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