Welcome back everyone! Today, we end off the western medicine series as we proceed to the pharmacy to collect the medications for Earth. Below is the result from when I surveyed my peers on how they dispose of their medications.
Figure 1 (Source: Author)
Side note: All 38 respondents are undergraduates in various educational institutions with bulk of them studying in Singapore. They span across different disciplines from reading the same course as me (Environmental Studies) to pursuing a degree in law or pharmacy. This is true for all the figures that I have used on my previous posts. \
Before I go further, I would like to critic my vague use of “medication” in the survey. What was not properly conveyed to the respondents then was that I was trying to refer to expired, non-prescriptive or over-the-counter drugs. Unfortunately, with reference to Figure 2, this means that analysis using the collected data would be rendered largely inconclusive.
That being said, if we run with the assumption that all respondents had the same definition of medication as me, it is reassuring to see that nearly three-quarters of us dispose of our drugs properly (ie throw into the bin). Interestingly, this percentage also matches the result of a similar survey conducted by the National Council of Social Service.
Figure 2 (Source: Pharmaceutical Society of Singapore)
“Medication waste is “preventable healthcare waste” and everyone in the supply chain has a role to play”
Associate Professor Lita Chew (NUS Department of Pharmacy) in an interview by Neo Chai Chin in Today.
To prevent an excessive accumulation of medications (and to save you some money), you can also adopt some of the following steps to reduce pharmaceutical wastage:
- You can request to cutback your dosage to last for a fortnight first. This ensures minimum wastage if your body reacts poorly to what was prescribed.
- For long-term prescriptions, instead of bulk buying the drug, you may opt for collections every few months instead.
- A community pharmacist may advise you on how to productively utilise your medications before purchasing new ones or whether they are still as effective.
Apropos to why we continue to keep medications even past expiration dates, I believe that it may be associated with our Asian values and upbringing. Throughout the histories of war and famine, we’ve learnt to conserve and utilise all the resources we have to ensure our survival. This mindset can still be seen today from the cornucopia of ways that we’ve used the coconut, to the preservation of vegetables for consumption during winter and perhaps, the storage of unused pharmaceuticals.
On a more hopeful note, a recent study has revealed that most drugs found in pharmaceutical waste can be given a second life when properly treated. If done efficiently by all pharmaceutical outlets, this has the potential to reduce the volume of drugs manufactured and subsequently, diminish the adverse impacts on the environment.
If we are persistent in our efforts to be more aware of the life cycle of the medicine we consume, we can collectively reduce its detrimental effects on Earth and sustainably redesign its methods of production and disposal. Collective individual effort coupled with systemic changes are just the right remedies for Earth to start recovering and hopefully, with consistency, Earth can begin to breathe clearly again!
See you next week as we enter the realm of alternative medicines!
ENV3102
September 28, 2020 — 12:49 pm
Hi Chuan,
This is such a great post overall. Lots of individuality. And great job paraphrasing.
Could you please post this comment so your peers might see some feedback on the primary research aspect ?
(1) Maybe start off by saying what you did before you show the results.
(2) Always tell your readers how many respondents you sampled.
(3) Looking at your pie chart, I get the sense you asked an open-ended question – is that correct ? Many of the responses that you classed as distinct slices (e.g., keep in the cupboard, hoard even after the expiry, keep even after expiry, etc.)…. Are they really ? This is called ‘binning’. You look at the data and make the decision that really a number of responses that appear somewhat different are effectively the same and you bin them together. That would simplify your chart.
No need to respond – these are just tips to help all of you improve.
jc
Li Zhe
September 29, 2020 — 8:30 pm
Hey Yin Chuan, when you mentioned medication waste it led me to think of how other medical wastes were disposed. By medical wastes I am referring to syringes, blood bags and needles. With all these being labelled biohazards and many made up of man-made materials, I was wondering how significant these are in terms of generating waste? These I imagine cannot be easily recycled (if even possible) and can be difficult to dispose of. Additionally, excuse my multitude of questions, would be how then are medication dealt with once with the pharmacy?
-Li Zhe
yinchuan
October 12, 2020 — 12:47 am
Hi Li Zhe, very sorry about the late reply, I’ve thought about touching on this topic in the early stages of this blog but I decided to stray away to focus on medicine instead. (@ next batch of BES students, you can take this idea”)
But it is an important issue that is encompassed under the theme of healthcare. In Singapore, most medical wastes are collected and sorted into bags of different colours (representing the type of waste they contain) before being sent to one of the 5 approved treatment plants. There, they are incinerated into ash and mixed in with sludge waste. Depending on the bag’s colour, they are burned with different conditions to ensure that they do not pose a biomedical treat to the environment and public. I can only assume then that it poses relatively little threat to the environment. However, it is important to address the fact that most medical equipment are single-use for hygiene purposes and as such, the amount of waste produced is almost insurmountable! I do hope one day we can find a way to sanitize the equipment properly to curb this issue.
I assume your second question is regarding expired medications sent back to the pharmacy. I have yet to find any proper publications surrounding the pharmacy’s way of disposing said drugs but an indirect benefit of doing is such that pharmacists can take into account which kinds of drugs are they overprescribing or are ineffective. In recent times, there has been a growing issue of over-prescription of drugs to patients which not only increases the volume of pharmaceutical wastes but also wastes of money and eventually raises the price of healthcare, thereby denying people of lower income to afford this basic necessity. Therefore, even though (publicly) we are still unaware of what they do to the returned medication, it is still an important step in limiting future wastes and keeping healthcare affordable.
For the safety of the consumers, I don’t think that the returned drugs can be repurposed immediately in fear of being tempered with, but I do hope the local study (mentioned in my post) would produce more results and eventually be included in the lifecycle of medicine, making its journey circular instead of linear.
Thank you for reading my post!