When Bobbie Beerons poked through her stash of medicines in search of Tylenol for a neighbor, she was surprised by what she found.

“I keep all my meds in a plastic container, and as I looked through them I realized more than half were outdated,” she said. “Then I wanted to get it all out of the house.”

But instead of pitching the old pills — some in pharmacy bottles, others in over-the-counter blister packs — in the trash or toilet, she hit the Internet to see what she should do.

“I really didn’t want all this to get into our groundwater,” said Beerons, of Pittsford, late last month at the Ogden Police Department, where she handed over her plastic bag of old medications for destruction under Monroe County’s Pharmaceutical Waste Collection program.

Since the program began in 2008 to help keep medicines out of area waterways and landfills, environmentally conscious residents such as Beerons have turned over more than 16 tons of expired or unwanted drugs — a weight equivalent to that of seven full-size automobiles.

“Pharmaceuticals are one of the emerging environmental concerns,” said Tom Sinclair, industrial waste engineer with the county’s Environmental Services Department. He was instrumental in putting together the county’s pioneering program, which has been recognized for excellence at the state and national levels and is a model for other municipalities.

Research by the U.S. Geological Survey shows that detectible contamination from pharmaceuticals — antibiotics, steroids, synthetic hormones, antidepressants and painkillers — is being increasingly found throughout the nation’s watersheds and waterways, including those used for drinking or watering crops. Estimates are that as many as 80 percent of the nation’s waterways are affected.

Potential health effects on humans from long-term exposure to traces of drugs in drinking water are unclear, as there have not yet been any studies, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But some researchers have linked elevated pharmaceutical levels in waterways to reproductive problems in fish and amphibians.
In addition, there’s fear that long-term exposure to antibiotic traces in the overall environment could lead to the evolution of more drug-resistant bacteria and microbes.

Sinclair said it makes sense to keep potential contaminants out of the water in the first place.

“And, there’s also the diversionary part of this,” he said, noting that prescription drug abuse among young people is on the rise. “If these things are old and hanging out in your medicine cabinets, it’s sometimes easy for kids to get to it and who would know?”

No filter

Pharmaceutical waste enters our watersheds in a variety of ways, from being excreted naturally by people or animals taking the drugs or direct disposal down the drain or in landfills, where rainwater percolates through the garbage, creating contaminated liquid leachate. That leachate ends up in groundwater or is sent on to water treatment facilities. And water treatment plants aren’t set up to filter out minute traces of drugs, said Sinclair.

“That would be prohibitively expensive,” he said.

Run the sink, flush the toilet or take a shower, and for most people in Monroe County, that waste water travels through a labyrinth of sanitary sewers to one of two waste-water treatment facilities run by DES: Northwest Quadrant in Hilton and Frank E. VanLare in Irondequoit.

There, the water undergoes a four-step, 10-hour cleaning process before being released into Lake Ontario.

First, screens and grit chambers in the treatment plants pull out materials like sand, stones or large objects that could clog or damage the facility’s equipment.

Then, secondary treatment mixes the waste water with microbes, protozoa, algae and fungi that digest organic materials. That mix gets separated into a sludge of solids and a layer of treated clear water. The solids are reused, while the clear water is further treated with an iron compound that removes phosphorus, a nutrient that can cause explosive growth of nuisance algae or weeds in the lake.

In the last step, the clear water effluent — now stripped of solids and phosphorus — is disinfected with a chlorine compound found in common household bleach. That kills disease-causing germs before the treated water is piped back to the lake. The solids are generally taken to landfills, where they’re used to produce methane gas that runs generators and produces electricity.

Northwest Quadrant can treat as many as 22 million gallons of water per day, while VanLare can treat as many as 135 million gallons per day, or up to 660 gallons per day in the event of heavy storms.

Model program

Ogden became a county pharmaceutical waste collection site this year, and so far 151 people have dropped off 961 pounds of old medications that could have ended up in waste water.

The drugs — as are all the drugs collected in the program — were taken under police protection to a waste-to-energy incineration facility in Niagara Falls.

During a typical collection at the site — one of seven held each month through Monroe County’s Green Initiative and partnerships with law enforcement — residents bring in enough old drugs to fill two 40-gallon barrels.

“I’ve been amazed,” said Gay Lenhardt, Ogden town supervisor. “I never dreamed people kept so much of this around.”

In some cases, as in Beerons’, the old drugs dropped off were simply expired.

In other cases, the drugs were cleaned out of the homes of deceased relatives, or were prescribed but either weren’t finished or didn’t work.

Sinclair said the collection program, a 2009 winner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation Environmental Excellence Award and the EPA’s Environmental Quality Award, is about educating residents about what to do with their unwanted medications and making it easy for them to do the right thing.

He’s hoping to add more collection sites in the coming months.

Ross Gridley of Hamlin stopped by the Ogden collection because he knew he would be in the area.

“This has just been sitting in a cabinet forever,” he said, handing over an unfinished and mostly full prescription bottle of cough medicine. “It was convenient for me to stop by because I was already going to the library.”

Ogden Police Chief Douglas Nordquist said he’s happy to use his department to help keep unused or unwanted medications under safe control.

“It’s a nice service for our residents and it potentially helps keep some of these drugs off the street,” he said. “And out of the water.”