At the University of Southern Maine in Portland, whenever nature calls, the toilets answer back.

Stickers posted above toilets around campus say, “I’m not a trash can! The garbage you flush could end up in the ocean.”

The students who put the stickers there hope to warn a captive audience about the damage caused by flushing trash – from bottles of prescriptions drugs to disposable wipes. It’s a problem that clogs sewer pump stations, litters beaches with syringes, pill bottles and other trash and injects medications such as mood-stabilizers and hormones into drinking water supplies.

“I never even thought about that,” said Michael “Adam” Royer, a sophomore criminology major from Falmouth and one of USM’s toilet police. “I figured it all went to a sewer plant and they took everything out. I had no idea that what you flush goes directly out into the ocean when we get a lot of rain.”

Rain can flood sewer systems with stormwater, forcing untreated sewage to spill out of overflow pipes into Casco Bay and other waterways.

And even when it doesn’t rain and the sewage makes it to treatment plants that remove the trash, pharmaceuticals and other chemicals flow right out the other end. “Prescription drugs are a huge problem because people don’t want them in their house (and) they just flush them down the toilet,” Royer said.

Royer and other students learned about sewer overflows, pharmaceuticals and marine debris as part of a project for a criminology class called Crimes Against the Environment.

Sandra Wachholz, the professor behind the idea, is a local expert on things that get flushed into Casco Bay.

Wachholz regularly collects trash along the shoreline of Back Cove, home of some of the city’s sewer overflow discharges. She finds wipes, plastics of all variety, pill bottles and syringes, which she thinks are flushed after being used for insulin injections.

The connection between sewage and criminal justice is based in part on the legal system in Sweden, where Wachholz has taken students to study the legal system. “They have an environmental court, prosecutors and police,” she said.

They also have stickers on or around their public toilets that warn against flushing trash.

Students in the class have made presentations about indiscriminate flushing, but the stickers are a natural way to spread the word. Anyone who spends any time on campus will eventually get the message.

“To have 10,000 students passing through and using those bathrooms is just this extraordinary opportunity to raise awareness about this,” Wachholz said.

The Portland Water District, which has the dirty and costly job of repairing clogged pump stations, printed the talking toilet stickers for Wachholz and her students.

Royer, who plans to go to law school, is glad his eyes have been opened to the indelicate issue of overflowing sewers, although he doesn’t look the same way at beach litter. “It’s kind of gross when you think about it.”

That’s probably a big reason people don’t think before they flush. Except in the bathrooms at USM.

Reports that mood-stabilizers, hormones, antibiotics and other drugs are finding their way into drinking water supplies around the country are no surprise to Dr. Stevan Gressitt, a Bangor psychiatrist.

He’d been waiting for those headlines.

The more immediate issue for Gressitt is: What do we do about it?

Gressitt and others are about to roll out a program that could become a national alternative to simply flushing unused drugs down the toilet. Sometime this spring or summer, Maine will become the first state to test a mail-in drug-disposal program.

It’ll happen just as concerns about the problem are peaking.

The Associated Press reported this week in newspapers across the country, including this one, that medications have been detected in public water supplies for 24 metropolitan areas around the country. While suppliers said the levels are so low that water remains safe to drink, the widespread presence of pharmaceuticals – and America’s fast-growing appetite for drugs – worries a lot of scientists, as well as people who simply like their water chem-free.

“People are not happy about drugs in their water. That’s not a scientific survey, that’s just what I hear,” Gressitt said.

No Maine water supplies have been tested at all for pharmaceuticals, according to state and local officials. The Portland Water District said this week its water is safe and unlikely to have any traces of drugs because of the way it protects Sebago Lake and disinfects the water.

Drugs get into the environment, and ultimately into drinking water, in two primary ways. First, people take medicine and then excrete the non-metabolized portions into the sewers. And second, people flush or throw away pills and ointments that have expired or no longer wanted.

Scientists are studying the metabolism problem. The flushing issue is where we come in.

There is a lot of disagreement around the country about what we should be doing with unwanted drugs. But everyone agrees that flushing them down the toilet is asking for trouble. Officials here also advise against throwing them into the trash.

Mainers are being advised to turn in the drugs to police departments or at periodic collection events. One such collection is coming up in the Bath and Brunswick area June 3, although details have not yet been announced.

The other official option in Maine is to hold onto the drugs in a safe place a little while longer, because help is on the way.

State agencies and the University of Maine Center on Aging plan to launch a pilot mail-in program this spring. Free drug-disposal mailers will be placed in selected drug stores in Cumberland, Aroostook, Kennebec and Penobscot counties. Later this year, the agencies will test the same program statewide.

Mailers will be addressed to the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, which will make sure the medications are disposed of as hazardous waste.

Gressitt, who has helped lead efforts to find a statewide solution, said the next step will be to make the program permanent.

If we keep flushing, he said, Maine’s water could make news, too. “We’re not immune.”

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

Read John’s blog at:

www.pressherald.com