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Adding Environmental Footprints to Birth Control Choices

As Rodgers notes, one important step is to improve both water and sewage treatment systems. Our current sewage treatment systems aren't designed to screen out hormones, and so are relatively ineffective at doing so. Some water treatment plants are responding to the demands of a chemical-infused world. Others balk at the high cost of testing water for such contaminants -- around $1,000 per sample -- and note that until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires such screening, it simply doesn't make sense.

©Linda Lewis
Another problem has been inaction on the part of the EPA, which was required by Congress in 1996 to begin screening various chemicals for their potential to act as endocrine disruptors. Fifteen years later, progress has been slow, although the past two years have shown increasing action. However, as Barbara Seaman explained in 2003 in The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth, the EPA and the National Institutes of Health “spent several years and several million dollars investigating natural and synthetic chemicals that mimic hormones. Shockingly, both these massive multimillion-dollar studies ignored the proverbial elephant in the room: the pharmaceutical and veterinary estrogens and other hormones that human and animals have been eating and depositing into the environment for years -- hormones that have been proven to be linked to hormone-dependent breast, uterine, ovarian, and testicular cancers."
Astoundingly, even as more was being demanded of EPA in the 1990s, less was being asked of drugmakers. In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) slashed the number of drugs required to demonstrate environmental safety. By 2005, the FDA was finally reconsidering this stance, noting that the potential health hazards of various chemicals remain unknown.
While regulatory agencies struggle to catch up, some towns are taking steps to clean up their acts, creating drug collection programs where citizens turn in unused pills rather than flushing them. In one pilot program in Maine, amazed police watched as 52 people turned in 55,000 pills. Drug makers, while denying that their products are pollutants, have cautiously offered financial support for efforts to establish risks and develop methods to contain them.
Scientists at Sweden's Goteborg University are worried that newer hormonal contraceptives -- namely the contraceptive patch and the vaginal ring -- may be especially potent polluters if not disposed of properly. When a woman throws away her monthly patches, each one still contains around 600 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol. If that patch is flushed down the toilet, it continues to release hormones into the environment at higher rates than they occur in urine as byproducts or because of discarded pills. The vaginal ring may be even worse: NuvaRing has around 2.4 milligrams of estrogen by the time it is thrown away, 33 percent more than three discarded patches and six times more than a full cycle of oral contraceptives. While we wait for better disposal solutions, users should be careful not to flush either patches or rings when they are finished with them. The patch should be folded in half and both wrapped in paper and thrown in the trash.MORE