Life Below Water: A Threat to Environmental and World Health

sustainability

Life Below Water: A Threat to Environmental and World Health

By Mindy & Gracie

June 29, 2022

Most of us probably have a “mini pharmacy” at home where we keep a variety of essential medications for fever, flu, cough, etc.

When was the last time you spring clean your mini pharmacy?

1 year ago? 6 months ago? Or never, and just replenish when it is running out?

If you are this type of person, you might need to reoperate your mini pharmacy and take a look of the medicines stored in it. We believe many of you will find a lot of surprises there: expired, unwanted or unused medications, because medicine box is a place where people wouldn’t check regularly.

What would you do?

Flush down the drain?

NOOOOO!!!

If the medications are flushed down the toilet or drain, they will enter the wastewater treatment system, which is designed to remove contaminants from wastewater. Unfortunately, many of these treatment systems are not designed to eliminate pharmaceutical contaminants.

Throw together with household trash?

Definitely a NO

When you throw medicines into your household trash, the medicines will end up going to the landfills and get buried in the ground. All these pharmaceutical contaminants will then leach into the soil. People use the soil to grow vegetables, fruit….. And we eat it. It will become a circulatory system, passing down from generation to generation if we do not stop doing it.

This is called… Pharmaceutical Pollution

Paracetamol, nicotine, caffeine and epilepsy, and diabetes ingredients were widely detected in streams, rivers, and lakes according to a study by University of York. This kind of pollution from medicines and pharmaceutical products is posing a threat to environmental and world health including You, Me and the Aquatic Wildlife.

Human Being

Improper disposal of medication will pollute underground water and the source of our drinking water because the active pharmaceutical ingredients would circle back to us due to the incapability of the wastewater treatment system. If we take these chemicals, they have some desired effects on us and then leaving it in our bodies.

Aquatic Wildlife

And not to forget it would hurt fish and other aquatic wildlife especially it can lead to changes in the behavior and reproduction of the ecosystem, like sharks – rising attacks, frogs, and fish – with bizarre sexual traits: Male species with eggs growing inside their testes.

Worse yet, we are consuming Fish and Seafood….

What Alpro is doing for you and the environment?

After knowing pharmaceutical pollution is getting more serious all over the world, we, Alpro Pharmacy, decided to do something for You and The Environment. We have installed medication disposal bins in all our 165 outlets to provide a Safe, Convenient, and Free way for you to dispose your expired or unused medication in a proper way.

All you need to do is bring them to the nearest pharmacy to dispose of your medicines safely

Watch how we started the #SafeMedicationDisposal Programme

Watch how we started the #SafeMedication
Disposal Programme

We only accept controlled medicines which fulfill the criteria:

✅In tablet or capsule form

✅In semi-solid form (such as cream)

✅In liquid form (such as syrup)

✅Expired or with an unclear expiry date

✅Content cannot be identified

✅Spoilt or contaminated

You Can Dispose Your Medicines Safely At Your Nearest Alpro Pharmacy.

We encourage everyone to bring your expired or unwanted medicines to your nearest Alpro Pharmacy and we would do the rest: dispose of the medicines safely! Let’s start with You and Us for better health and well-being of our future generation, don’t let our cure become nature’s toxic.

In Alpro, we believe that the environment belongs to all of us and a well-managed environment supports healthy ecosystems, which keeps people healthy. Therefore, we started a small action for our environment, our community in support of the United Nations Global Compact and the Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life below water with our safe medication disposal programme to reduce the amount of medicines going to the environment.

Please join us together!

Support #SafeMedicationDisposal

Support #SafeMedication
Disposal

By SIGNING this pledge:
I will dispose my expired, unwanted, or unused medicines correctly through Safe Medication Disposal Bin at Alpro Pharmacy.