You know the drug companies will balk at this and claim safety issues while trying to protect their profits. They may present the biggest hurdle since some states have been willing to try pilot programs.

New Life for Old Pills

Every year we flush at least $1 billion in prescription drugs down our toilets. We pour them into incinerators; we bury them in landfills. But Moshe Alamaro, an inventor and researcher at MIT with not-just-big-but-colossal ideas—such as building 200-foot ice mountains to fight water shortages—believes he has a solution for unused pharmaceuticals. “We recycle glass and plastic,” the silver-haired Alamaro said one recent afternoon, wearing owlish glasses and sitting among the stacks at the MIT library. “Why all the apprehension about doing the same for a bottle of pills?”

It’s not that simple, of course. You can’t just toss your pills in a bin with your soda cans and drag them to the curb. Alamaro’s plan entails nothing less than wholesale changes to how we think about packaging, distributing, and consuming prescription drugs. Pills would come in tamperproof packs and include a bar code or radio frequency ID to provide such details as dosage amounts and expiration date; a chemical agent would record the drug’s exposure to heat and light (which can make many medicines less effective). The packs would be loaded in a Pez-like dispenser, ensuring that unused pills would be untouched and safe for recycling. Patients could then return their medications to processing centers via a drop box or prepaid mailer. The centers would inspect the drugs, and pills in good condition would be available for redistribution.