Ask Ashley
Disposing of Prescription Drugs Safely
January 14, 2008
Q:
We’ve recently sold our house and now we have the arduous task of cleaning it out and moving all of our things. What we won’t be keeping, giving away, selling or recycling will sadly have to go to the dump. We’ve tried our best to recycle most of the odds and ends but we’re having trouble with what seems to be an endless supply of old prescription and over-the-counter pills, tablets, syrups, etc. etc. Should we flush them, throw them in the garbage or is there somewhere we can take them for proper disposal?
Your help is greatly appreciated,
Peter & Jill
A:
Dear Peter & Jill,
It is estimated that 10,000 tonnes of pharmaceuticals are disposed of annually Canada-wide and because drugs are manufactured with the intention of performing a biological effect (altering our bodies to cure whatever ails us) it’s important that we take care in their disposal. Although many people still adhere to the long-held practice of flushing old medications down the toilet, a large number of studies have shown why this might not be the best option.
It seems that pharmaceuticals, hormones, personal care products (PCPs) and their metabolites are now widespread in aquatic environments world-wide, even after passing through some of the world’s best waste water treatment plants. Acute (i.e. immediate) effects tend to be limited due to the low concentrations found in the environment but the subtler, long term impacts of low-level exposure are becoming of greater concern, particularly because many of these drugs and their metabolites are disruptive to proper endocrine function, interfering with reproduction and development in wildlife and humans. Add to this the additive or synergistic effects of multiple drugs interacting and the problem only compounds.
It was these concerns that led the British Columbia government to enact the Waste Management Act – Post-Consumer Residual Stewardship in 1997, making all brand-owners responsible for the collection and management of left-over pharmaceutical products. This legislation was instrumental in creating Canada’s first pharmaceutical stewardship program and since then, in an attempt to address liability and other concerns, the Post-Consumer Pharmaceutical Stewardship Association (PCPSA) has been established to administer this stewardship program nationwide. The program allows Albertan’s to return unused and expired medication to over 850 pharmacies province-wide where they are collected and “incinerated in an environmentally friendly manner.”
You may be asking yourself: but what about just throwing them in the garbage? This must surely be better than incinerating them. The problem with putting medication in the trash is that once the pill container enters the landfill, gets crushed under millions of tonnes of other waste, allowing the pills to interact with other items around it, it may be that the pills begin to dissolve much like in a persons stomach, leaching down to where all the liquids are collected, only to be treated at one of Calgary’s waste water treatment plants anyway.
So, given everything that I’ve written and with PCPSA beginning to use non-incineration thermal techniques to deal with pharmaceutical waste, I would encourage you to use your local pharmacy to dispose of any expired, unlabelled or unused medications. Keep in mind that the bulk of pharmaceuticals that enter our waterways aren’t from those bothersome leftovers but from the medications that we ingest and then excrete. So I guess it can be said that having fewer drugs in our bodies of water starts with us putting fewer drugs in our own bodies. That’s darn good material for a children’s book if you ask me!
Fitly,
Ashley
Ashley Lubyk, BSc. in Environmental Science, formerly a Calgary Materials Exchange Program Assistant at Clean Calgary Association. Please send your question concerning Water, Waste, or Recycling to Ashley.