How I earned over £300 in Boots points during my maternity leave

Maternity leave is a wild ride, and an expensive one at that! That's where the Boots Recycling Scheme comes in SUPER handy. By recycling certain items in store, you can snag a whole host of bonus Boots points when you do some Boots shopping.

What is the Boots Recycling Scheme?

Boots offers a way for you to recycle hard to recycle items in store, and get Boots points by way of reward for doing so. There are two parts to the scheme, Beauty items and Blister packs.

• You can recycle "Beauty" packaging items such as bottle teats, old dummies, baby wipe packets, nappy packets, milk storage bags, baby food pouches, nipple balm tubes, as well as other generic beauty products like old manual toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, sample sachets, face wash dispenser pumps... to name but a few things!

  All you have to do is keep hold of 5 eligible items of recycling, rinse them clean, upload them to your app and take them into store. Once deposited, you get a voucher in the app which gives you 500 Boots points when you spend £10. You can only do this 8 times in a month, and only once per day.

• You can also recycle "Blister"packs of empty medication packs. This includes vitamins, so super handy with all those pregnancy and post-partum vitamins you've been taking. Any medication is fine, prescription and non-prescription.

  All you have to do is keep hold of 5 eligible items of recycling, make sure they are empty, upload them to your app and take them into store. Once deposited, you get a voucher in the app which gives you 100 Boots points when you spend £5. You can only do this 8 times in a month, and only once per day.

Top tip

You can do both the "Beauty" and "Blister" recycling at the same time, so one £10 transaction will allow you to use both vouchers earning you £6 of Boots points on a £10 spend! That transaction will also gain you the normal Boots points, including bonus Parenting Club points (8 points per £1 on any eligible baby items).

What do I need to do?

• Keep hold of eligible empty "beauty" packaging (or blister packs for medication). Some of the items I've recycled before are (empty and rinsed):

  Breast milk storage bags, baby food pouches (even own brand supermarket ones count too), bottle teats, dummies (remember to change these regularly), baby wipe packets, nappy packets (if you use Pampers, don't forget to scan the code to collect points towards money off vouchers), empty toothpaste tubes, moisturiser tubes, sample sachets, shampoo pouches, eyeliner and mascara tubes.

• Download the Recycle with Boots app from your app store

• Connect your Boots Advantage card to the app (or get one if you don't already have one, don't forget to join the Parenting Club too, check out my other blog post about this).

• Collect together 5 eligible items.

• Log into the Recycle with Boots app and add your recyclables - follow the app instructions, it's pretty easy to do, just "Add Recyclable", follow the prompts to photograph it and select the brand and product type.

  Top tip: If you have multiples of the same product and brand, you can select one you have already uploaded, and "Add another of this item", which will ask you to photograph the product, but you won't have to select the brand and product type again. I keep one of each item I regularly recycle in my "Approved" items to make things speedy!

• Head into your local Boots store with your recycling goodies and find a "Recycle with Boots" bin

• Open your "Recycle with Boots" app, and select "Deposit". This will prompt you to scan the QR code on the bin.

• Once scanned, select the items you want to deposit and continue

• You should then have a voucher ready to use! This will be in your app "Wallet".

• When you have £10 worth of products to buy and are ready to checkout, scan your Boots card, and then "reveal" your voucher from your wallet in your "Recycle with Boots" app. You only have 5 minutes to use the code so only reveal it when you are ready to checkout!!

• If you have deposited blister packs too, you can reveal and scan that voucher as well.

Simple!

I'll try and do a little demo video soon!

I have made so much money in Boots points using this scheme during my maternity leave, I have managed to buy:

A Cybex Sirona Gi I-SIZE Car seat worth £299.95 (I got it for £203.97, when Cybex had 20% off, AND there was also a 15% discount via parenting club!)

A Cybex Gold Line Pushchair Footmuff worth £99.95 (I got it for £84.96, when there was a 15% discount via parenting club)

A Naturally Sheepskins Snuggly Sheepskin Pram Liner worth £69 (I got it for £62.10, when there was a 10% discount via parenting club)

An Ickle Bubba Flip Magic Fold Highchair worth £69 (I got it for £58.65, when there was a 15% discount via parenting club)