During a move this past year, I was cleaning out the bathroom and came across some old medicine that we had never thrown away. I was about to toss them when I thought twice about what might be the proper way to dispose of expired or no longer needed medicine. After a bit of internet research, here is what I found.

In the past, people were encouraged to flush their pills down the toilet in order to make sure that they weren’t fished out of the garbage and end up in the wrong hands. Especially when you have children in the house, you don’t want pills that can be mistaken for candy lying around in reach of little hands. Now we know that flushing them is more just “out of sight, out of mind.” An Associated Press Investigation this past year found drugs in the drinking water of 24 major metropolitan areas across the country. Wastewater treatment cannot remove these drugs completely from the water and therefore whatever drugs are flushed down the toilet, whether from human elimination or from dumping of old medicine, ends up in our water supply and in the environment. Results of this buildup of medications include poisoning or mutations in wildlife, particularly fish, increased antibiotic resistance among harmful bacteria, and the potential consumption of "background levels" of everything from estrogen-disrupting chemicals to mood-altering ones, with unknown long-term effects on all of us.

Although there isn’t much we can do regarding the human elimination factor in this equation, we can avoid dumping medicine down the drain and adding to the drugs in our water.

The best option is to take your medicine to a hazardous waste facility where your waste will be incinerated. Earth 911 has a search box where you can enter what you would like to recycle (in this case “medicine”) and your address to find the nearest location of a hazardous waste collection site. Many places have started programs in order to educate people regarding the option of taking your old medicine to the appropriate facility. If you live in Washington State, Group Health Pharmacies collects medicine for incineration. In Santa Cruz County in California, a program put together by the County called Sharp Solutions has collection sites for unwanted medication as well as used needles. Ask your local pharmacy if they collect unwanted medicine. More education needs to be done on this issue and hopefully more collection sites and programs will become available as the demand for it increases.

If you don't have a local facility that will take your old medicine, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Health offers four steps for the proper disposal of old medication which seems to be the general consensus on the best way to dispose of medicine yourself.

1. Keep medicine in original container. Mark out personal information on prescription bottles.


2. Mix liquid medicine with undesirable substances like coffee grounds, cat litter, or dirt. Dilute pills with water, then add coffee grounds, cat litter, or dirt.


3. Place bottles in an opaque container, like a yogurt container, and secure lid; or wrap in a dark colored plastic bag.


4. Hide the container in the trash. Do NOT recycle.

I would also add a fifth step of taking the trash out to the dumpster or your outdoor trash container instead of putting it in your kitchen trash.