Keeping Northern Illinois Beautiful

Pharmacy Volunteers’ Lend Their Expertise to Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful

Every year, a huge quantity of medications go unused or expire, posing dangers for both the environment and individuals at risk of drug abuse. In response, UIC College of Pharmacy volunteers have dedicated their expertise and time to ensuring that thousands of pounds of medications are properly disposed.

Since 2018, student and faculty volunteers from UIC Pharmacy in Rockford have partnered with Keeping Northern Illinois Beautiful (KNIB) for the organization’s annual medication-collection event. Volunteers have aided the effort at several takeback sites in the Rockford area, including on the UIC health-sciences campus. Last year, UIC faculty and students logged more than 40 hours of volunteer time, with UIC Pharmacy student volunteer commitments reaching more than 55 hours in 2018. This year’s event took place Saturday, June 11, from 9:00 a.m. to noon.

UIC’s partner in the event, KNIB, is an environmental nonprofit that collects recyclables and hosts other events, like clothing drives and the Great American Cleanup, where volunteers beautify the outdoors. KNIB and UIC’s collection event makes a difference for clean water and public safety, while giving UIC Pharmacy students a chance to put their medication knowledge to real-world use, participants said.

“It prevents medications from going into the environment, for example, our water system,” said Dr. Kevin Rynn, vice dean for UIC Pharmacy’s Rockford campus. “And it’s a service that UIC provides to our community . . . getting medications out of the hands of potential abuse or misuse and accidental ingestion.”

P2 Student Elizabeth Okyne

Drugs with potential for abuse or harm left in medicine cabinets or drawers around people’s homes can fall into the hands of individuals with addictions, people looking to experiment, and even children and others innocently ingesting something dangerous, Rynn said. “Children, pets, and others could accidently get into them, or teens and older individuals could purposely abuse them.”

At the collection events, UIC faculty and students, along with KNIB volunteers, gather at sites across northern Illinois. (These locations have included Loves Park City Hall, Belvidere Township Building, Machesney Park Mall, South Beloit Fire Station, and MercyHealth Winebago Clinic. UIC health-sciences campus donates a large retrieval area.) Residents drive up with their old or unneeded medications and pass these items out through their windows. Pharmacists (each site must have a licensed pharmacist to supervise) and pharmacy students lend their expertise to properly categorize medications as controlled or noncontrolled substances. Controlled substances like opioids are secured and handled separately, with everything eventually being incinerated.

Dr. Kevin Rynn and Yu-Jean Park

Volunteers at the event come from the College of Pharmacy, with a student group usually sponsoring volunteer recruitment, said Cindi Schaefer, UIC Rockford director of student affairs, who coordinates with those groups. The last few years, the College of Pharmacy fraternity, Kappa Psi, has taken on that role.

For seasoned experts like Rynn and new student volunteers alike, the sheer quantity of drugs that comes in can be eye-opening. “One of the surprises was especially how many meds we collected that first year, before COVID,” said Patrick Ndungu, PharmD ’21, who has volunteered since 2019. “We had 10 or 12 different tubs just full of different medications. For me, it brought into perspective, they say don’t flush your medications down the toilet, but many people do. . . . I’m first of all shocked at the amount of meds that we do get.”

KNIB tallies medication hauls by barrels collected, pounds of aerosols, and pounds of medications. “Some of the bigger years, it was close to 5,000 lbs. of meds,” Rynn noted. Indeed, in 2018, the takeback effort brought in more than 4,600 lbs. of drugs across five sites, including more than 2,000 lbs. at UIC, usually one of the bigger sites. Last year, with the event picking up steam again after a pandemic off-year, volunteers sorted through more than 2,000 lbs. at four sites. The event filled 30 barrels with old meds in 2018, including five barrels at UIC.

The quantity of drugs with abuse potential stands out for Rynn, he said. “I’m always surprised at how many controlled substances, opioids and benzodiazepines, that come in,” he said.

Ndungu agreed. “I was shocked . . . especially when you think about the opioid epidemic or how people would keep those meds and just use them,” he said. “It’s really helpful to get those medications out of the house and dispose of them properly.”

KNIB volunteer efforts have helped clean old meds out of a swath of homes across northern Illinois, with nearly 830 households served in 2018, including almost 200 at UIC. About 500 households were served last year, nearly 130 of which were served at the UIC campus.

UIC volunteer student pharmacists have gotten a lot out of the experience, too, participants said. Current P2 student pharmacist Elizabeth Okyne joined her husband, Ndungu, to volunteer at the event for the first time in 2020, before she’d officially started at the college. The event can bolster a beginning or seasoned pharmacy student’s drug knowledge with real-world experience, Okyne said. “It got me exposed to learning about a lot of drugs even before I started pharmacy school,” she said. “It was really cool to see that firsthand, especially when it came to narcotics . . . [controlled substances] versus the noncontrolled. . . . It’s a good exposure even if you haven’t thought of pharmacy school.”

Volunteering also gets a budding pharmacist out there and interacting with the public, Okyne added. “It’s just nice to meet people. We did it in Belvidere, where we were able to meet the senior citizens. It was cool to interact with people like that.”

Ndungu agreed that the event provides an educational and experiential benefit to pharmacy volunteers. “I actually like that it helps with my drug knowledge,” he said. “It’s not only been helpful for me to learn about medication disposal, but also educating the patients year round on where they would dispose of these medications.”

On that point, Rynn noted that the public should know they can inquire in their community pharmacy about medication disposal, too. In the unlikely event that people can’t find a takeback event or site, the FDA says individuals can get rid of the most dangerous substances, such as opioids, by flushing them. “There is a short list of drugs that FDA [says] the benefits of getting rid of them immediately in the toilet far outweigh the risks of someone accidentally getting into them or ingesting them,” Rynn said.

And if individuals can’t make it to an event or the pharmacy with their old, noncontrolled substances, these meds can be thrown out. However, the FDA recommends first mixing them with something unpalatable, like cat litter or coffee grounds, “so someone doesn’t accidentally get into them in the garbage,” Rynn said.

While educating the public on such details of drug disposal, pharmacy volunteers at the KNIB collection event can also gain a new perspective on their field, Ndungu said. “From a pharmacy standpoint, we’re always thinking of prescribing, prescribing, prescribing,” he said. “We never really think of how much of their medications people take or what happens to the meds, for example, unfortunately, if someone passes away. . . . So it’s definitely something I would encourage not just student pharmacists but anyone else [with an interest] to take part in.”