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CLEMMONS — The Village of Clemmons Stormwater Department, with collaboration from the Forsyth Sheriff Office and Inmar Intelligence, hosted its fifth Fall Medicine Drop in an effort to dispose of unused or expired medicine in a safe and secure way from our households on Oct 14.

This year’s drop resulted in 103.55 pounds of medication being collected, protected local homes and waters.

Medicine drops prevent people from flushing medicines down the drain which also helps protect waterways. The dangers of prescription and over-the-counter drugs that get flushed down the drain in typical wastewater treatment systems, like wastewater treatment plants and septic tanks, are not designed to treat medications and they simply cannot filter out 100 percent of those chemicals.

Prescription and over-the-counter drugs will pass through these systems and enter our groundwater and surface water resources untouched. Those pharmaceuticals are slow to break down, or don’t break down at all which will pollute drinking water and harm aquatic life.