[Pharmwaste] Measuring the amount of pharms reaching surface water

[Volkman, Jennifer]

Hello list serv friends,
 
A MN legislator is possibly proposing some legislation related to pharmaceutical collection.  She is very concerned about the impacts to fish, etc.  
 
In attempting to provide information on the regulatory and other barriers to collection of household pharms, I threw out a number, based on what I could recall from several previous messages, that from 5 to 20% of pharms in surface water are there due to direct sewering of waste pharms by households and hospitals and that the rest is what passes through our bodies and so can't be diverted (not easily anyway), from sewering.
 
The staff from her office would like to know what 5-20% would be in pounds per year.  I said it was a pretty elusive number and that I have not seen anything close to an actual estimate of pounds.  The more I think about it, I wonder if the 5-20% numbers are even good.  We can certainly guess that for households some percent is taken and expelled, some is in storage (for years), some is disposed of through sewering and some is disposed of in the trash.  For hospitals, it would be a similar mix of the same.  
 
I thought maybe the State Pharmacy Board might track the number of prescriptions written or filled and from that we could extrapolate, but I wouldn't have much confidence in the numbers.
 
Does anyone have any other ideas or has anyone tackled this question in another state?
 
I thought it might make more sense to ban hospitals from sewereing any pharms and/or require manufacturers and pharmacies to get involved in a solution, rather than to try to establish a collection system that puts all of the weight on the already overloaded HHW collection system.  I had a nice discussion with the people from Washington State on their drop off system which still isn't approved by DEA, but seems to be going well otherwise.
 
Please let me know your thoughts,
Thanks!
Jnifr