Drugs, household chemicals are a risk ‘we haven’t fully begun to understand’

It’s a connection that few people make, but the medicines and personal care products that are part of daily life also are part of the Puget Sound pollution problem.
Collectively called pharmaceuticals and personal care products — PPCPs for short — those items contain thousands of chemicals which, when excreted from our bodies or washed off our hair and skin go down the drain and into the sewer or septic system.

And if the sewer system includes a wastewater treatment plant that dumps treated wastewater into Puget Sound, chances are those chemicals to some degree are polluting the Sound.

“There’s a big risk, but we haven’t fully begun to understand that risk,” said Melanie Redding, a state Department of Ecology hydrogeologist.

This much is known:

• Of the 10,500 chemicals used in personal care products such as shampoo, sunscreen, toothpaste and lipstick, only 11 percent are tested for their toxic effects by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

• One-third of all personal care products contain at least one known cancer-causing agent.

• Many of the chemicals act like hormones and have the ability to alter the reproductive systems of fish and cause birth defects.

“We’re finding them everywhere — in groundwater, wastewater, in our bodies and the breast milk of mothers,” Redding said. “This is all fairly depressing.”

Redding said Ecology is in the early stages of coming to grips with the water quality problems associated with PPCPs. The next step will be a monitoring plan to figure out how prevalent PPCP chemicals are in the environment.

She said conventional wastewater treatment plants break down only about 10 percent to 12 percent of the medicinal and personal care chemicals that end up in the sewer. The treatment rate can jump to more than 90 percent when solids at the treatment plant are retained in the treatment process for five days to 15 days, she said.

The LOTT Alliance treatment plant in Olympia retains solids for nearly 10 days on average, noted Chris Cleveland, a consulting engineer who has had a hand in LOTT treatment plant improvements over the years. Most Puget Sound treatment plants have a solids retention time of 3 to 8 days, he said.

While nobody has run the expensive tests to see what PPCP chemical concentrations are in the treated LOTT wastewater, Cleveland is confident most of them are captured and broken down at the plant before they reach Budd Inlet.

It’s possible that in the next 20 years or so, wastewater treatment plants will be required to test for and treat the pharmaceutical and personal care products that make their way through the sewer system, Ecology and LOTT officials said.

A more cost-effective approach is to keep them out of the wastewater in the first place, through manufacture of less toxic products, informed consumer choices and better disposal of unused prescription and over-the-counter medications, said David Stitzhal, coordinator of the Northwest Product Stewardship Council.

The council is a group of government organizations working with businesses for better cradle-to-grave handling of products.

A five-county pilot project with Group Health Cooperative to take back unused medicines began in October and has collected nearly a ton of medicine, Stitzhal said.

There’s still a lot of public education to do to keep medicine and personal care products out of the environment, including Puget Sound, he said.

source:www.theolympian.com