If you live in a city or town, chances are that everything you pour down the drain ends up at the local waste water treatment plant.  So before you flush, pour or dump anything into a toilet, sink or drain, think about what if might do to your waste water treatment plant, and YOUR environment.

Your local wastewater treatment plant is designed to treat human wastes and dirty water from household activities such as bathing, showering, laundry, and dishwashing.  Once treated, the clean water is safely released to a river, lake, or stream in your community.  When other items-including household chemicals-are sent to the WWTP, they can harm the treatment process and increase the overall cost of wastewater treatment.  Some chemicals may pass through the plant and be released to a waterway in your community, potentially harming human health and aquatic life.  The sewage treatment plants in use today are not designed to remove all drugs from treated water.

So how do we dispose of medications we no longer need?  Our choices have been to leave them in the medicine cabinet, flush them, or throw them in the trash.  There are problems with all of these options.

If kept in the cabinet:  Keeping old medication in the house can lead to accidents.  People may get confused about which drugs to take, or take expired, ineffective medicine.  Young children can finds meds, which could lead to accidental poisoning.  Unneeded prescriptions kept at home can also tempt abusers.

If flushed:  Disposing of medication this way causes harm to the environment.  Drugs kill beneficial bacteria responsible for breaking down waste at sewage treatment plants.  Flushed medicine can also damage septic systems.

If thrown in the trash:  Drugs thrown in the trash can wind up in the hands of small children, be consumed by animals, or wind up in the hands of illicit drug users.  Identity theft can occur if person information is left on the medicine bottles when discarded.  Drugs can eventually leach into the landfill and wind up in our ground water.

To properly dispose of medications, dissolve tablets or capsules in the original container with a small amount of water.  For liquid medications, add sawdust, kitty litter or flour to the original container;

Remove labels from prescription bottles or completely mark out all patient information;

Put all lids back on the containers tightly and put them in a heavy-duty sealed bag.  Tight lids and sealed bags will help keep the medications from leaking out; and put the sealed bag in your trash so that it is not visible from the outside trash bag to discourage possible misuse.

Medications disposal is quickly becoming an important issue.  As a society, we’re taking more medications that ever before, and as the population ages, those numbers will only increase.  The above solutions are only temporary.  Two Rivers is concerned with our natural resources so we are going to be bringing “Take Back” programs to our 7 county region.  A take back event is a one day event, where individuals may bring in their prescription and over the counter medications to a designated area, and we will sort and destroy the medications properly, at no cost to you!  Phelps County will be the first scheduled event, taking place at Phelps Memorial Hospital on Saturday June 7th 2008 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.  Watch for more take backs happening in your area!

If you have questions, please feel free to call Two Rivers Public Health Dept. at 1-888-669-7154.