Hey y’all!

Our group (Kate, Lyndsey, Yuxi, Austin, Joe, Sam, and I) was really struck by what Dr. Page told us very early in the class about the complicated process to responsibly dispose of unused pharmaceuticals. We had never even considered the connection between pharmaceuticals and the environment, but the more research we did, the more we were convinced that this is a concrete way that the average citizen can be conscious of their environmental impact.

Our original idea was to work with and through some local pharmacies (CVS and Walgreens), surveying people about how they dispose of their pharmaceuticals — just throwing them away, flushing them down the toilet, keeping them, returning them to the pharmacy, etc. Our awareness about the issue had been quite low before beginning the project, so it seemed likely that Wheaton’s population would be similarly uninformed. This sort of survey seemed like a great idea… until we found out that both pharmacies have a strict no-solicitation policy. Whoops.

We’re currently working on (and waiting for the results from) a google survey, which will hopefully reach about 500 people in Illinois. Like any project change, this has some upsides and downsides: we will hopefully get more responses than we could with pencil and paper, but the results won’t be limited to Wheaton.

Again, because of the no-solicitation policy, we can’t leave brochures/flyers at the pharmacies to encourage proper disposal, so we had to rethink this as well. Dr. Richter made an awesome suggestion — the French Market! A wide variety of people congregate there, many with previous interest in environmental issues (think of all the fresh produce available there!) and there are no solicitation issues involved. We’re planning to go distribute the information on November 7 and November 14 — hopefully we’ll see some of you there too. C’mon, it’s the French Market… you should be going anyway. Get some fresh croissants, drink some apple cider, and become better informed about environmental issues? Win/win/win.

We’ll keep you updated 🙂