Uh oh! Medicine cabinet overflowing with expired pills?
Flushing old meds might seem like a simple solution, but it's a sneaky villain for our water systems. Toilets and sewage treatment plants are really meant for water, waste, and toilet paper, not medicines. How you throw away medications can affect the environment and the water YOU drink.
We've all been there. You open the medicine cabinet and maybe there’s that bottle of allergy meds you haven't touched since that one rogue spring three years ago, or the antibiotics you never finished after your ear infection cleared up.
Thankfully, there are free and anonymous events from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, April 27, 2024, all across the Brazos River Basin to help with that.
Drop off those unwanted medications with professionals who will dispose of them safely and properly, as part of “National Prescription Drug Take Back Day” conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other government and public safety officials. No questions asked.
The typical American medicine cabinet is full of unused and expired drugs, of which only a fraction are disposed of properly, according to Harvard Health Publishing. And there is quite a bit of evidence of pharmaceuticals in the water affecting aquatic life, particularly fish, according to Harvard.
The National Prescription Drug Take Back Day aims to provide a safe and convenient means of disposing of prescription drugs while also educating the public about the potential for abuse of medications. It’s also a good time to talk about why you shouldn’t flush them. These Take Back events are held twice a year. In April 2023, almost 4,500 different law enforcement agencies participated in helping to collect 332 tons of medications.
Wastewater treatment plants play a critical role in protecting public health and the environment by removing contaminants from wastewater before it is discharged back into the water system or reused. And while wastewater treatment plants can remove some chemicals, some wastewater treatment plants, septic systems, or drinking water treatment plants are not currently designed to completely remove pharmaceuticals from the water.
An effective way to reduce the amount of chemicals in our water is by curbing household disposal of pharmaceuticals into our water systems.
“In homes that use septic tanks, prescription and over-the-counter drugs flushed down the toilet can leach into the ground and seep into groundwater,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “In cities and towns where residences are connected to wastewater treatment plants, prescription and over-the-counter drugs poured down the sink or flushed down the toilet can pass through the treatment system and enter rivers and lakes. They may flow downstream to serve as sources for community drinking water supplies.”
“This is kind of an emerging environmental concern, and these wastewater treatment plants were not originally intended to address this type of contamination and, in fact, are not actually intended to address contaminant concentrations at these part per trillion levels, these very, very low concentrations,” said USGS Research Ecologist Dr. Paul Bradley in this USGS article. “It turns out that there is evidence that even at these really low concentrations, some of these emerging contaminants are actually harmful to the environment,”
To find a collection site near you, click here and type in your zip code. Check back if you don’t see a spot near you, as organizers are continuously adding drop-off locations. If you miss the event, there are several year-round drop-off locations. Go here to find one near you.
Each pill disposed of properly is a small victory for clean water. So, ditch the disposal drain and become a champion for a healthy planet.