Don’t Flush Your Expired Medications!

Everyone has old, expired medication hanging around their bathroom cabinet or the cupboard above the stove where we store our medications to keep them safe from children and pets. It is definitely a good idea to clean out your medicine cabinet once a year to get rid of those old medications. The fact is that expired medications often lose their effectiveness, and some may even have the opposite effect of being harmful once they have expired.

So what do you do with those expired medications? I was appalled to find that many websites suggested flushing them down the toilet as a way to safely dispose of them. This is definitely NOT correct. My husband currently works at our local wastewater plant, and flushing expired medications or drugs of any kind is a very bad idea. (My husband has a whole list of things that wastewater plant personnel hate to have flushed down the toilet, but we’ll save that list for another day).

Wastewater plants are not designed to handle household hazardous wastes like expired medication. Many medications have very high concentrations of metals, chemicals and/or organic substances that do not break down easily in the wastewater treatment process. These medications can end up in our water supplies in trace amounts and also get into the soil and become environmental hazards. Sampling of wastewater tests have shown trace amounts of different types of medications in water than has been treated and is ready to be released.

The other problem with flushing expired medications down the toilet is that they can become a health hazard for wastewater personnel, especially if they are mixed with something else that someone else has flushed down the toilet and become a toxic substance or gas. For instance, if someone flushed bleach down their toilet, and someone else on the same block flushes ammonia down their toilet, these can combine to become deadly chlorine gas. There is no way to know what other people are flushing down their toilets, but expired medication is not something that should not be flushed at all.

So what do you do with these expired medications? Some websites I visited suggested throwing them away in sealed plastic bags. If you throw them away, there is a chance that children or pets could get a hold of them, or unscrupulous types who will sell the expired medication or use your personal information on the bottle to steal your identity. Even if the expired medications make it to the landfill, they can get into the soil and ground water and still present an environmental hazard.

The best choice for disposing of expired medications is to return them to your pharmacy. Most pharmacies have annual drives for expired or unused medications. Many pharmacies distribute bags specifically designed to collect expired medications. Once the pharmacy has collected these medications, they are shipped to a medical distribution center for safe incineration.

If by some chance your pharmacy does not participate in this kind of program (and you should be suggesting strongly that they begin) every community has annual household hazardous waste days where you can bring things that cannot be taken to the landfill for disposal. Ask the personnel if they handle expired medication, and if they don’t ask for a recommendation for where to take it for safe disposal.

This is the only safe way to dispose of expired medications. Returning them to your pharmacy is convenient and free. It greatly reduces the possibility for environmental hazards and prevents the ingestion of medications by someone else. It is everyone’s responsibility to dispose of their expired medications in an acceptable manner.