How to Dispose of Expired Medications

It is easy to buy and use medicines only after seeing the expiration date. However, if you have outdated prescription or other medicines lying in your medical closet try to dispose them of immediately. Keeping expired medications can be hazardous upon its expiration they turn into toxins. Make sure you carefully dispose of the expired medications from your home or office.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Identify expired medications. Check the containers and inspect the color of the medication.
2. Adopt one of the safest disposal methods for all expired medications. You can flush medications down the toilet or discharge it in a toxic dump site. This is also the simplest way to dispose of expired medications.
3. Take the medications to your local hospital. Every medical facility allows consumers/patients to bring in their expired medications which they carefully dispose of every week. The service is free. All you need to do is to find out days of the week or month when you can bring in your expired medications for disposal.
4. Take the expired medications to a nearest pharmacy. The pharmacy has an efficient disposal management program for all used as well as unused drugs and medications.

Tips & Warnings

• Categorize the medications in your storage based on the date of expiry. This way you can keep a track of ‘recently expired’ and ‘soon expiring’ medications.
• Call your nearest pharmacist for more information on disposal.