May 13, 2005

City Hopes to Stop People from Throwing Drugs Down the Drain

By Lorraine Sanders
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

The words “hazardous waste” prompt images of toxic green sludge oozing from shadowy industrial complexes, used syringes washing up on beaches and other such horrors. But San Francisco City and County agencies are worried about hazardous waste spilling from a site much closer to home: your medicine cabinet.

Pharmaceuticals enter the sewer system either through human waste or when people dump expired or unused medicines down the drain. The drugs then move virtually untouched through the city’s sewage treatment system and emerge in local streams, estuaries, and in the Bay. Once they’re in the water environmentalists and public health experts worry that these miracle-cures-turned-pollutants will interfere with the reproductive cycles of fish, birds and other wildlife.

A 2000 U.S. Geological Survey, the most recent comprehensive study of pharmaceuticals in waterways, found pollutants from drugs and other personal care products in 80 percent of the 139 water bodies it tested, including the San Francisco Bay. In 2002, the San Francisco Estuary Institute likewise identified traces of antibiotics, anti-depressants and chemicals from personal care products in local waterways.

More research, especially into the effect these pollutants have on aquatic life, is needed, but the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and Department of the Environment (SFE) aren’t waiting to see how the mountains of medicines may be impacting the local eco-system before taking action.

“Rather than study all of the negative impacts that may be possible, we are going with the prevailing understanding that many of these pharmaceuticals can have a negative effect and developing a policy,” says Lewis Harrison, manager of SFPUC’s Water Pollution Prevention Program.

City residents can expect to see that policy, as well as a take-back program for unused and expired medicines, emerge this summer. San Francisco will then join a handful of other California counties, including San Mateo and Marin, who are trying similar pilot projects.

Much like the city’s “Only Rain Down the Drain,” campaign that raised awareness about the harmful effects of used oil and household cleaning products on stormwater runoff, the pharmaceutical pilot program will urge San Franciscans to stop pouring unwanted medicines down sinks and into toilets.

Preventing unused or expired medicines from heading into the sewer system won’t mean the San Francisco Bay is completely free of pharmaceutical pollutants, but it’s a start. “A huge portion of the pharmaceuticals that we consume leave our bodies as excrement and that, there is nothing you can do about it. We’re talking about the controllable source of the pharmaceutical discharges, [that] is what we’re after,” says Harrison.

Drugs that don’t go down the drain have to be discarded somehow, and finding an alternative disposal method isn’t easy. Dumping medicines in the garbage only sends them into landfills, where they can leach into groundwater. “All landfills leak eventually,” says Marjaneh Zarrehparvar, SFE’s residential toxics reduction coordinator. “The only other option is to manage the stuff like toxic waste.”

That requires collecting medicines and sending them to an incinerator at a hazardous waste disposal facility. But collecting pharmaceuticals is a tricky business. Federal drug laws prevent retailers like pharmacies or local governments from collecting controlled substances like codeine and morphine.

“According to [the DEA], we cannot knowingly accept controlled substances,” says Karin North, an associate engineer for the City of Palo Alto who has planned and implemented pharmaceutical take-back programs on the Peninsula. “If it is put into a drum container that is never sorted through and taken to an incinerator, then that’s okay. So the only way around [the law] is by having a container that is a one-way-in, no-way-out container.”