Sigh. I have lofty zero-waste goals. I love the Zero Waste Chef blog, and aspire to a minimalist, organic life.
We do lots of things right: grow lots of food, eggs, refill milk in glass jars, and a local bulk foods store has gone to using mason jars instead of bags. I buy loose tea there, can recycle DH's coffee bags there, refill my metal laundry soap container; so many good things. We compost a lot; chooks get some of the food scraps that are less good in the compost pile; we heat with wood and use scrap paper and newspaper and flyers as fire-starter. We make our own soap and cleaning products, yogurt, etc and preserve a lot of our staples in re-usable jars.
The tough one for us is soft plastics. They are recyclable, but not in our curbside pick-up, which means I just never seem to get to it. I would also love to cut down our recycling packaging, though. We buy meat in bulk, but this past summer we had meat trays and aluminum cans for soda...one day we'll get a CO2 tank set up for our own sparkling water...
No tips on the ibuprofen, OP. We buy at Costco in a big plastic container. But if blister packs are the only waste you're producing, you're doing awesome! :-) Thanks for starting this topic; I'm looking forward to learning from everyone. And for helping me remember that we do pretty well, really. It's easy to beat myself up for the things I know I could be doing better, but truthfully, we've worked at this for a long time and have made a big dent.