Our prescription for climate change: reduce and recycle inhalers!

It’s an emergency — you take a deep breath in. But this time the emergency isn’t a patient collapsing in front of you: that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach is the sense of alarm that comes from knowing that you are contributing to irreversible, anthropogenic climate change — by prescribing an inhaler! Unbeknown to most doctors and patients, metered-dose inhalers (MDIs) — the most common is the trusted ‘blue puffer’ salbutamol — pose a devastatingly significant and direct threat to the environment. Although the Montreal Protocol led to the phasing out of ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in inhalers in the 1990s, sadly, they were replaced with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs — although unreactive with ozone and thus safe for the ozone …