Shutting down, a little, the flow of drugs into waterways

Earlier this week, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement that will stop five health-care facilities from flushing unused pharmaceuticals down the drain… and out into the New York City’s vast watershed, which serves 9 million people. It’s not illegal to flush most drugs, and the drugs showed up in drinking water only at minute concentrations. Still, the EPA calls pharmaceuticals “contaminants of emerging concern” and this is undeniably a good first step. Attorney General Cuomo is investigating ten other health-care facilities that discharge effluent to the watershed. How many more such facilities are there? I’m trying to find out.

Big picture-wise, cutting the discharge of drugs from health-care and pharma-manufacturing facilities is welcome. But far more drugs make their way into waterways when humans take them and then excrete the fraction that isn’t metabolized. You can read more about the fate of pharma in our waterways in this piece I wrote for the NRDC’s OnEarth magazine.

But let’s get back to unused drugs: what should we do with them? (Some studies estimate that as much as half the medication prescribed is thrown out or sits around unused.) Consumers have been advised to put pharmaceuticals into tightly sealed containers inside our trash cans. But Maine Public Broadcasting Network reported last Friday (read and listen here) that state DEP investigations have found prescription drugs leaching from landfills in concentrations high enough to threaten surface and groundwater supplies.

Landfills collect leachate (the liquid that seeps through landfills, picking up traces of everything we’ve thrown in there) and send it through waste water treatment plants. But these plants weren’t designed to neutralize drugs: out the pipe they go, into other bodies of water. So what’s the solution?

Maine State Rep. Anne Perry has proposed a bill that would require drug companies that distribute medication in Maine to take responsibility for collecting and properly disposing of unwanted drugs in medical waste incinerators (other jurisdictions due this through pharmacies or hospitals). In the past, says Perry, pharmaceutical manufacturers have  objected to what they say would be the bill’s intensive requirements and high costs — upwards of $20 million.

Surely the cost of tainted drinking water and unhealthy aquatic ecosystems is far larger than that.