Benefit to the Community
Letter to Mayor Julian CastroTeam DR.MED informed the Mayor of San Antonio, Julián Castro, of our project and the importance of the awareness in our community over the disposal of pharmaceuticals. The following document is a letter we respectfully wrote in request of our mayor´s approved support on DR.MED´s project whom main goal was not only to herald and discover new contentions but also included the significance of causing a positive impact in our community.
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Letter to Senator Leticia Van De PutteWe discovered that there wasn’t a particular law in Texas that regarded pharmaceutical disposal. Therefore, we decided to also contact Senator Leticia Van De Putte since she is not only involved in politics in the State of Texas but she also pursues the occupation of being a pharmacist. We desire to compromise criterions and with her assistance write a bill that could consequently become a law in our state that would require pharmacies, hospitals, and any medical field to inform the consumers of the proper disposal in case of any expired or unused medications.
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Identifying Community DataWe strive to raise public awareness, not exclusively in our community, but throughout society. This is an emerging frontier and an environmental dilemma. Improper drug disposal must be addressed. Our community and society must be educated for proper drug disposal procedures and comply with protocols already recommended by current scientific consensus points. Pursuing this further, we decided to gather the accurate percentages of the present misconceptions in our community by completing a survey. The template of this survey may viewed by from the following document and the results are presented in a data sheet.
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Benefit to the Community
The Edwards Aquifer is vital to the health and well-being of all nature and humans in and around San Antonio, Texas. It is considered to be one of the nation’s most unique groundwater resources, providing life-sustaining water for the nation’s 7th largest city. In addition to the city, it serves the surrounding towns, rural communities, farms, ranch lands. All of South Texas depends on the Edwards Aquifer’s water for domestic, agricultural, industrial, municipal, and recreational purposes.
People once thought the aquifer would serve the needs of the region forever. It is now understood, after many years of drought, that this is not the case and we must do everything we can to protect our main water system, especially considering the growth of population that is occurring in this region. In 1993, the Texas Legislature passed the Edward’s Aquifer Authority Act. This legislation was designed to protect and preserve our dearest groundwater resource.
We believe that all people in our region must start realizing that this area’s clean water, some of the purest water in the world, is a limited resource. Whatever we do in the area of our watershed, we will have to accept the consequences over time. We often hear about large construction projects being denied because of the potential to affect the aquifer and compromise our resources, but we don’t always consider the things we, as global citizens, do every day. When you consider that San Antonio has a population of 1,373,668 people, if most of them do even very simple careless things on a regular basis, it is bound to have a powerful negative impact on the environment.
One of San Antonio’s industry leaders is the U.S. Military. In fact, some people call San Antonio Military Town, USA. On these San Antonio posts and bases are some of the finest hospitals in the world that serve an abundance of patients every day. Most patients leave with some kind of medication to be taken for the short or long term. Our team decided to focus on the disposal of these medicines and the potential impact of this disposal on our aquifer and environment. We decided to first take a survey to determine how people dispose of medicines they no longer need or use. An overwhelming majority reported that they just flush it down the toilet or toss it in the garbage. Many reported that they are careful to remove any prescription identification but they did not even think twice about the impact on the environment of throwing it away carelessly. These are not lazy or uncaring people, for the most part. They just do not understand how fragile the environment is and how we all need to think about our own individual habits if we are going to protect our environment and preserve our water’s purity.
We decided to see what effect these medications might have and whether their impact would be easily filtered out by the natural filtration process of the soil. We decided that if data collected supported our hypothesis, we would do whatever we could to determine the extent of the problem, learn about and educate the population as to how to properly dispose of medicine and to what services are already in place. We would also encourage hospitals and pharmacies to improve and expand their services for properly disposing of medications no longer needed or used by their patients in convenient and environmentally friendly ways.
People once thought the aquifer would serve the needs of the region forever. It is now understood, after many years of drought, that this is not the case and we must do everything we can to protect our main water system, especially considering the growth of population that is occurring in this region. In 1993, the Texas Legislature passed the Edward’s Aquifer Authority Act. This legislation was designed to protect and preserve our dearest groundwater resource.
We believe that all people in our region must start realizing that this area’s clean water, some of the purest water in the world, is a limited resource. Whatever we do in the area of our watershed, we will have to accept the consequences over time. We often hear about large construction projects being denied because of the potential to affect the aquifer and compromise our resources, but we don’t always consider the things we, as global citizens, do every day. When you consider that San Antonio has a population of 1,373,668 people, if most of them do even very simple careless things on a regular basis, it is bound to have a powerful negative impact on the environment.
One of San Antonio’s industry leaders is the U.S. Military. In fact, some people call San Antonio Military Town, USA. On these San Antonio posts and bases are some of the finest hospitals in the world that serve an abundance of patients every day. Most patients leave with some kind of medication to be taken for the short or long term. Our team decided to focus on the disposal of these medicines and the potential impact of this disposal on our aquifer and environment. We decided to first take a survey to determine how people dispose of medicines they no longer need or use. An overwhelming majority reported that they just flush it down the toilet or toss it in the garbage. Many reported that they are careful to remove any prescription identification but they did not even think twice about the impact on the environment of throwing it away carelessly. These are not lazy or uncaring people, for the most part. They just do not understand how fragile the environment is and how we all need to think about our own individual habits if we are going to protect our environment and preserve our water’s purity.
We decided to see what effect these medications might have and whether their impact would be easily filtered out by the natural filtration process of the soil. We decided that if data collected supported our hypothesis, we would do whatever we could to determine the extent of the problem, learn about and educate the population as to how to properly dispose of medicine and to what services are already in place. We would also encourage hospitals and pharmacies to improve and expand their services for properly disposing of medications no longer needed or used by their patients in convenient and environmentally friendly ways.
