There are drugs in your water. Don’t be alarmed, scientists have not yet linked traces of pharmaceuticals in water sources to human health effects. While the narcotics, antibiotics, and others might be present in waterways, it would take one person who drinks 8 glasses of water per day 40,000 years to ingest the equivalent of one children’s dose of Tylenol. Nonetheless, the presence of pharmaceuticals in this way is still pollution and it should therefore be addressed as such. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Pharmaceuticals [in water sources] have already been linked to behavioral and sexual mutations in fish, amphibians and birds.” It only takes 5 or 6 billionths of a gram of estrogen per liter of lake water to affect fish. Dual sex organs are worrisome when detected in marine life, enough so that many grassroots groups and organizations like the EPA have created plans for responsibly disposing of pharmaceutical drugs so as to stop more damage from being done to aquatic ecosystems.

So, what can you do? Drinking bottled water is definitely not the answer. No matter what the label says, there is no way to be sure that bottled water is screened with stricter conditions than tap water. More often than not, it’s less regulated than municipal drinking water. With that said, here are some suggestions for how to keep drug residue out of our drinking water:

1. After removing unwanted or expired medicines from their original containers, mix them with something like used kitty litter or coffee grounds and put the substance in a can or sealable bag, then throw it in the trash. This will hopefully prevent drug abuse and accidental poisonings.

2. Find a pharmaceutical take-back program in your area which will collect and safely dispose of your unused meds. On earth911.com, a database of information about how to get rid of your junk in an eco-friendly way, you can type “Unwanted or Expired Medications” into the search bar along with the area in which you live and a whole list of places that provide take-back services will pop up. There were about 10 within 15 miles of me when I checked.

3. Learn more here, here, and here.

These steps are just temporary solutions because there are still many ways in which drugs can enter water sources that are beyond our control. Even though human health is usually not affected by this phenomenon, that doesn’t mean we should not be taking precautions to prevent things from entering the environment which were never meant to be there in the first place.

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