What do you do with your unused and expired medications? How do you get rid of used motor oil and solvents? Your painting is done but you have some paint left over, what do you do with it?
Many people will say “I pour it down the sink or flush it down the toilet”. Even more people will lie when they say they don’t put it down the drain. Your drains are not garbage disposals for all our waste. Doctors usually recommend that expired medications get flushed down the toilet. This line of reasoning is to prevent children and pets from consuming the drugs. Maybe a doctor can expand on their reasoning more, the purpose of this article is to make a case for why using the toilet to dispose of medication is a bad idea.
Why is dumping things down the drain such a bad idea? The answer is both simple and complicated at the same time. The simple answer is that everything that goes down the drain in whole or in part survives long enough to make it back into drinking water supplies. The long answer is that contaminates survive the sewer and waste water treatment and are released back into the environment with the treated water. Then the lakes and rivers are used for drinking water. The contaminants survive the drinking water treatment and enter our drinking water. Most of these contaminants survive because the largest part of waste water treatment is biological. Therefore, anything non organic will either pass through the treatment or disrupt the treatment process or become part of the biological organisms that are there to break down waste.
In either scenario, and really all scenarios happen all the time, contamination enters the environment. In 2011, a shipment of municipal biosolids from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada was refused at the American border. The biosolids are supposed to cross the border for disposal. This shipment was refused due to radioactivity. The radioactivity came from cancer patients as the chemicals from chemotherapy pass through the body and the wastewater plant all while remaining radioactive. Radioactivity is easy to detect and in this example the chemicals came from people’s bodily waste which is supposed to go down the drain. I only mention this example because it so clearly outlines how persistent many chemicals can be.
Some chemicals mimic our hormones and disrupt our natural body systems. They have been found to cause feminization of fish and are believed to cause early onset of puberty in humans. These chemicals can come from people’s medication and from all our waste. BPA is the most famous hormone mimic. It come from the breakdown of plastics and mimics estrogen in humans. Other pharmaceuticals tend to do what they are designed to do, just now they are affecting the wrong people. Most other chemicals just cause cancer.
This contamination isn’t limited to water. Earlier I mentioned that the chemicals can enter organisms. This is especially true of plants. Plants will absorb these chemicals and then they enter the food chain. I won’t describe the food chain here, all you need to know is that the concentration increased the higher up the chain. This is called biomagnification. The apex predators get poisoned first. The main problem with biomagnification is, we are the species that eat the most other animals.
There was a study in Scanadnavia that found flame retardants in cancer patients. They traced the chemical back to the bread they had all eaten. Then back to the wheat in the field where biosolids were spread. The flame retardants were found in the municipal wastewater facility and the municipal sewers. It was traced back to one manufacturer who was putting flame retardants down the drain as part of their process. I can tell you this happens everywhere. Even if you live on a remote septic system, there is always someone upstream. Hardly seems worth it for dumping chemicals down the drain.
You might be wondering why this matters to you. Simply, it matters because we all have a part in what we put down the drain. This is true whether you live in a large metropolitan area or a remote cabin on a well and septic system. What we release into the environment comes back at us in many different directions. Detecting these chemicals is difficult because there are so many different chemicals out there that nobody can check for them all or even most of them. A lot of these chemicals pass through store bought filters. Many of these molecules are smaller than the water molecule. That means every filter is ineffective against them. To put is simply, this problem affects everyone.
