My wife thinks used Rx bottles are used by some kind of charity.
Who would have a use for my wife’s stash?
This is almost certainly an urban legend. Where did she hear it?
Just went downstairs and asked.
A couple of churches she used to attend took up collections of Rx bottles, apparently. There was mention of using them in overseas medical applications and/or for arts/crafts.
As to why she doesn’t contact those churches… I’ll ask later. I’m too drowsy to do those stairs again tonight.
Donate them to the local landfill. Just place them in your nearest trashcan. It is 100% tax deductible.
A previous SO took his recently deceased Mom’s meds to her pharmacist asking if they could be recycled to other heart patients. The pharmacist said that it was illegal to ‘recycle’ them but that he could dispose of them if my friend felt he was unable to do so. Unopened, unsealed meds could sometimes be donated but each was subject to investigation.
The SO flushed them.
For the record, the wife is discussing wholely empty Rx bottles.
They’re empty plastic bottles, nothing special about them. I’d say toss them. If its anything like she heard about saving soda can tabs, it wouldn’t be worth the time anyway.
I always include mine with my glass and plastic recyclables. Plastic is plastic.
Other than doing the plastic recycle thing, there doesn’t seem to be much point to recycling pill vials. They are cheap enough that it wouldn’t really be worth it…
http://shop.tps-online.com/browse.cfm/2,142.html
Here is a supplier of the vials and the prices. Most seem to work out to a dime a piece.
My guess is that some church groups, schools, preschools, senior centers, or whatever might have a use for them in arts-and-crafts type situations. I imagine they could be useful for storing small buttons, beads, pins, etc., without the breakage problem of that other arts-and-crafts standby, the empty baby food jar. If your wife knows of any groups that want the bottles, great! They’ll get re-used, which is terrific.
But the expense involved in collecting, cleaning, storing and shipping teeny tiny empty plastic bottles has got to be greater than the cost of using other materials, like envelopes (anybody else remember getting little penicillin pills in wee little paper envelopes?). And that’s only relevant for those medicines that aren’t donated in single-patient packaging anyway. So I doubt medical charities really want them. Recycle those puppies.
And in reference to an upthread comment about unwanted medicines: Here we are asked not to flush them down the toilet. Most are water-soluble and therefore will not be separated out in the sewage treatment plant, meaning the drugs go into the water supply. Better to take them to a pharmacy, where they will be disposed of appropriately.
Some (non-muni) animal shelters use them for pet meds.
A buddy of mine collected a few thousand of them and donated them to some medical charity. Apparently it went to dialysis for juvenile kidney patients.
One thing you shouldn’t do is to reuse them for your pet’s stool/urine samples. I commonly get samples submitted in Rx bottles that still bear the original label. It is TMI that you are using estrogen inserts for vaginal dryness, for example!
I’ll let my wife know that reusing them for medical samples is right out!
That’s kinda’ funny, actually. No point in having someone analyze the contents of a contaminated container, though, not when you’re measuring values down to parts per million…
Ouch. That sounds like a variation on the (False) dialysis for pull tabs urban legend.
I was going to make this same point. But there is no need to take them to the pharmacist. They are perfectly acceptable as solid waste in your household garbage.
Yes, pull tabs for dialysis is an urban legend. But this was prescription bottles for dialysis. Doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but my buddy did get a “letter of appreciation” out of it.
And here’s a link for your edification: