Waste Medications

This is a tough situation because it's a safety vs. green issue. Parents with kids should properly dispose of old meds so their kids can't get it, and for a while many parenting advice pieces have said to dump the meds to keep kids safe. I think the recycling program idea is a good one, but like you I also think getting folks to use it would take some doing.

I guess my thinking from a parent POV is that I don't want the old meds in the house - to me some of it ending up in the water is safer than my kid getting it from the trash. I mean, I'm just guessing, but I think it's much less likely your child would get hurt due to meds in the ground water supply then meds in the garbage can. From a eco POV I suppose I don't want it building up in the water either though.

Last night after I went to bed I was actually thinking about this. My friend and I were recently having a conversation about all the vitamins they find in the sewer system, but in RN college we learned that many meds, not just vitamins don't go through people's systems well. So yeah, I'm wondering if that quantity makes the other issue a moot point too.

The Huffington Post has a Q&A up about this issue. The author has some good ideas about sustainable med disposal including some no brainers people might want to consider - i.e. stay healthy, don't wait til you need meds.

I am also an RN, I work in home Hospice. In California, up until a year or so ago, we flushed all left over controlled substances down the toilet. The law changed, now we mix some super gelatin and toss in the garbage. Still gets in the environment, but slower now.

I ran into this last year. I had a bad reaction to some antibiotics and contacted the pharmacy to see if they had a program to recollect. They told me to flush them or throw them away. When I told her that we have enough problems with antibiotics not working, we don't need it in our water systems and affecting other forms of life, she simply said that the local levels weren't high enough so it didn't matter. Well the levels may not be high enough right now, but if they keep telling people that it will be. I'm assuming all of our crap winds up in a wetland either locally or at the Mississippi delta. I just don't see how this has not been taken seriously.

Anyways, that's my thoughts on the issue.

Thanks for the input kantoquad - that's interesting about the gelatin. It strikes me as funny that it's ok to induce a slower contamination vs a quick one. I'm not sure what law-making folks are thinking.

srj0385 - there's a lot that's not taken seriously. It's astounding that people just don't care about the obvious stuff but will make a racket about totally unproven issues.

I've got an update on this topic...

 

Organic Consumers Association just posted a piece noting that pharmaceuticals turning up in streams and rivers may come directly from plants that manufacture them. Research published in Environmental Science & Technology (DOI 10.1021/es100356f) documents that treated sewage effluent from drugmakers can deliver to streams concentrations of painkillers that are as much as 1,000 times higher than levels in effluent from other sewage plants.

 

The piece notes, "Until recently, scientists have assumed that the primary source of drugs in rivers was excretion by humans. Although the federal government does not regulate discharges of pharmaceutical ingredients, industry scientists have argued that tight control of production processes and the great value of the drugs would ensure that only minor amounts of active substances would escape the factories, says Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg.

 

But in 2007, Larsson found that a treatment plant in India that receives drug factory waste was discharging as much as 31 mg/L of antibiotics in effluent, a concentration that is orders of magnitude higher than is typically found in U.S. waste water. He found the antibiotic ciprofloxacin at concentrations higher than recommended human blood levels. To begin to check whether the same issues might occur at the nearly 3,000 drug manufacturing facilities in the U.S., researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compared effluent from two New York state treatment plants serving drug manufacturers to 24 treatment plants not receiving pharmaceutical-plant waste in 12 states."

 

Learn more.