Basics About Household Medication Disposal
On this page:
Why Proper Disposal of Household Medication Is So Important
EPA encourages you to use pharmaceutical take-back programs that accept unwanted household medicines. These take-back programs offer a safe and environmentally protective way to dispose of unwanted household medicines. In fact, pharmaceutical take-back programs offer a dual public health benefit by helping to:
- Combat the opioid crisis by reducing access to unwanted household medicines, which helps prevent drug abuse and accidental poisoning.
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Protect the environment by reducing the flushing of household medicines, which prevents their release into ground water and surface water.
Learn more about:
- How pharmaceuticals enter the environment.
- The impact of pharmaceuticals released to the environment.
Proper Household Medication Disposal
It is easy to properly dispose of unwanted household medications:
Five Options for Household Medicine Take-backs:
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Drug Enforcement Administration take-back days.
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Kiosks at pharmacies.
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Kiosks at law enforcement agencies.
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Mail-back envelopes.
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Community take-backs.
Learn more about these five options.
Terminology
Below are some helpful notes on the terminology used on our webpages:
- Drug? Medicine? Medication? Pharmaceutical? You may notice different terms are used in different contexts and by different organizations. On these webpages, we use these terms interchangeably.
- Unwanted Medicine. A medicine may become unwanted - and then a waste - for many reasons: it expired; it wasn’t tolerated; it didn’t work; the patient didn’t need it anymore; etc.
- Active pharmaceutical ingredient. A substance that is incorporated into a finished drug product that performs the function of the drug product (as opposed to an inactive ingredient). API is a term that is more likely to appear in scientific literature.