Find a store
 Menu

Glasses Recycling Program

Making old glasses into new products with Opticycle

Recycle your unwanted glasses

  • Return

    Bring your pre‑loved prescription and non‑prescription glasses into your local Specsavers store and place them in the glasses recycling box or hand them to a team member.

  • Recycle

    Your glasses will be recycled and made into new sustainable building materials.

  • Reduce

    By recycling your unwanted glasses, together we can we can reduce landfill and give them a meaningful onward life reducing the need for raw materials ‑ an important first step towards circularity.

About the Program

As part of our responsibility to our people, planet and communities, Specsavers is committed to setting the industry standard for tackling the recycling difficulties related to optical products. That’s why we’ve partnered with Opticycle to develop an end‑to‑end recycling solution for optical waste so that your unwanted glasses can be responsibly recycled and made into new products, locally in Australia.

Glasses are made up of a complex mix of different materials which means that they can’t be recycled through curb side recycling. While donating glasses to underserved communities overseas may seem well‑intentioned, most glasses also can’t be reused and this approach does little to address the long‑term challenges faced by these communities, not to mention that it has environmental impacts that are often overlooked.

That’s why we’ve developed a responsible and sustainable approach to recycling unwanted glasses and lenses right here in Australia with an Australian recycling company.

Recycling glasses through Opticycle allows us to extract valuable materials, reduce waste and minimise the environmental footprint associated with glasses when they are no longer required by our customers

When you drop your unwanted prescription and non‑prescription glasses into your local Specsavers store, we’ll make sure they’re diverted from landfill and sent to Opticycle’s processing facility in Sydney. When they arrive at Opticycle, they’ll be sorted based on their main material composition. The lenses will then be removed from the frames before they’re dismantled and the materials separated using a series of mechanical recycling processes.

These materials are then passed on to local Australian companies as raw materials to be made into new products with meaningful onward lives such as sustainable building materials like pavers, bricks, blocks and eco‑aggregates, while any excess metals are sent to a metal refinery for further separation.

We don’t just recycle our customer’s unwanted glasses through Opticycle, we also recycle all of our own optical waste, ensuring that 100% is diverted from landfill.