Are you wondering what to do with the expired and unused medicines lying in your medicine box? If you are throwing them in a normal household dustbin, please refrain.
How to discard unused prescription medicines that have crossed the expiry date?
Most of our households have unused and expired medicines at home and usually wonder what to do with them. Firstly, no one should consume expired medicines. The expiry date is always printed on the product pack. Review that carefully and do not consume medicine even if the day you wish to consume is more than 1 day from the printed date of expiry. Medicines are safe and effective when consumed before their expiry period. The product shelf-life is determined based on certain experimentation by the manufacturer and it must be respected by all.
How can chemists help consumers in disposing of the unused and expired medicines?
Usually, all the expired medicines can be returned to the chemist for collection and returning it back to the distributor/ manufacturer. Few chemists maintain a dedicated box/ bin to dump the expired goods. These goods then are sent by the manufacturer or distributor for incineration at the designated bonafide centre.
What Can Patients Do with Unused Medication?
If your chemist does not offer the collection service, there are typically two ways for disposing of medications at home.
- Medicine flushing: Some medications can be flushed down the toilet or washbasin as soon as they have crossed their expiry date. This is applicable for tablets, capsules and syrups.
- Medicine disposal in domestic trash: Patches, eye/ear drops, creams, tubes are few of the products that you can dispose of in the domestic trash. However, all the contents must be emptied prior to their disposal. The contents can be flushed down for drops, creams etc. Patches must be removed from their packaging and must be covered with waste paper before trashing. The leftover containers can be packed separately and put in the dry bin for disposal.
If you have no facility of medicine flushing, you can take the medications out of their original containers and combine them with something unsavoury, such as discarded tea-coffee grounds, or mud. This renders the medicine less tempting to youngsters and pet animals, as well as unrecognisable to someone who might dig through the trash in search of drugs on purpose.
In order to prevent product information falling in the hands of miscreants, scratch off the label information as much as possible before disposing of the container in the trash. Unused patches must be torn before disposing off. People using inhalers, pumps etc. should read the handling guidelines as stated in product label or pack insert. After emptying them, wrap the empty inhalers and containers in a separate waste paper bag.
