What’s it mean to be green?
Green. It’s a buzzword, but, what does the growing awareness around green mean to pharmacy operators, beyond trading the white lab coats for olive?
For starters, become a receiving repository for pharmaceutical waste. Already two West-Coast pharmacies that trade on a “natural” druggist brand identity—Pharmaca and Elephant Pharmacy—have agreed to accept unused medicines and have them incinerated in the San Francisco Bay area.
Recent studies found that more than 80 percent of waterways tested in the United States contained traces of common medications such as acetaminophen, hormones, antidepressants, blood pressure medicine, codeine and antibiotics. Presently, as many as 54 percent of consumers throw medicines in the trash and 35 percent flush them down the toilet.
The Teleosis Institute, a not-for-profit organization offering a green solution on the problem of pharmaceutical waste, reported that more than 700 pounds of unused and expired medicines were diverted from San Francisco waterways in 2007, thanks to partners East Bay Municipal Utility District, Save The Bay, Kaiser Permanente, Elephant Pharmacy, Pharmaca, Whole Foods and the City of Berkeley.
Pharmaca has been the most successful with the new program, Joel Kreisberg, executive director of the Institute, told Drug Store News. “They fill up a 7-gallon bin every 10 days,” he said.
And that’s not a full calendar year of results—Teleosis launched the Green Pharmacy Program in May 2007.
The costs to implement a Green Pharmacy program aren’t extravagant—totaling a little more than $100 per month per take-back location.
Currently, 12 pilot take-back sites are operating in Bay area pharmacies, doctor and dental offices, veterinarian hospitals, healthcare facilities and local recycling events. Staff at take-back sites document all returned medicines and screen for controlled substances, which are turned away because of current DEA restrictions. Medications are collected from take-back bins for incineration (the most environmentally safe disposal method) by Integrated Waste Control, a Hayward-based waste hauler.
Green Pharmacy is unique in that the site manager documents all returned medicines through the Unused & Expired Medicine Registry, a program developed by the Community Medical Foundation for Patient Safety in Texas, which compiles national statistics on medicines returned and reasons for disposal. Once a statistically significant sample is documented, that data will be presented to pharmaceutical researchers, manufacturers and governmental organizations to build support for take-back programs nationwide.
According to Kreisberg, the purpose of collecting data on unused medicine is to identify which pharmaceuticals are most often unused or over-prescribed. “We can better comprehend the effectiveness of our current pharmacological approaches to illness.” he said.
That idea will go with the message that purchasing less affords less opportunity for more waste. The concept is especially relevant across all those acute remedies, whether nonprescription or prescription, due to the expiration dates. While this message may not bode well for club retailers or mail-order operators filling 90-day prescriptions, it’s a message that will resonate positively with operators trading on convenience, equating to more trips to the store. Reducing prescriptions to a 28-day supply cuts the amount of discarded medicines by as much as 30 percent, Kreisberg reported.
Even some medicines are becoming more eco-friendly. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration last month met regarding its proposed expansion of a ban on the use of ozone-depleting substances in metered-dose inhalers, which includes products containing epinephrine. Already, asthma inhalers containing albuterol will need to switch from chlorofluorocarbon-producing metered-dose inhalers to the propellant hydrofluoroalkane, which carries medicine into the lungs without emitting any known ozone-depleting chemicals, by December 2008.