With the arrival of spring, winter’s discarded trash – like beer cans and coffee cups – litter the roadside. But with New Hampshire in the middle of a heroin epidemic, there’s another kind of garbage poking up: hypodermic needles.
People have always been told to be cautious around needles, but there is renewed scrutiny with the state’s heroin problem and the recent emergence of the deadly opioid carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 10,000 times as potent than morphine.
With all the attention on intravenous drug use in New Hampshire, Todd Moore, administrator for the Solid Waste Management Bureau at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services said he’s been hearing more talk about how to safely dispose of needles.
“I’ve definitely heard a lot about it lately,” said Moore. “We’ve been dealing with this for years. With these new drugs it’s even scarier.”
Carfentanil has been linked to three deaths in New Hampshire and is so deadly that health officials say an amount smaller than a poppy seed can kill someone who touches it.
New Hampshire has laws on the books regulating safe needle disposal.
“A lot of people, for legitimate medical usage, generate sharps,” Moore said.
Because needles have such high potential to transfer bloodborne diseases, they have to be handled very carefully and by people who know what they’re doing.
People who have needles in their home for insulin injections or any other reason are required by law to dispose of them in a sharps container. Residents can make their own containers by tossing used needles into an old laundry detergent container, sealing the lid with duct tape and labeling it “medical sharps container – not for recycling.”
Laundry detergent bottles are ideal to use because they are made of thick, heavy plastic that can’t be broken easily, unlike a thin plastic water bottle or container made of glass.
“It’s all targeted at keeping the needles secure until they get to their final resting place, which is a landfill or an incinerator,” Moore said.
At the Hopkinton-Webster Municipal Solid Waste Facility, supervisor Jolene Cochrane said her transfer station isn’t allowed to refuse needles, but she admits she doesn’t like seeing sharps come in.
“That makes me nervous,” she said. “We don’t mess with them; we just put them into the trash ourselves and send them along. We don’t hang on to them and save them up.”
Police encourage anyone who comes across a needle on the side of the road to leave it alone and call police to dispose of it rather than handle it themselves.
(Ella Nilsen can be reached at 369-3322, enilsen@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @ella_nilsen.)