A plastic bottle of prescribed painkillers—extras from a surgical recuperation—lurks in the back of your medicine cabinet. If you’re like most Americans, you’ll either let the pills linger, flush them down the toilet or toss the bottle in the garbage. But each of those options carries risk. Improper disposal can cause environmental issues, while forgotten pills can be a source of prescription drug abuse.
A network of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration-registered collection boxes provides a secure disposal option, but chances are you don’t know the closest location off the top of your head. Especially if you live in a rural area.
A team of optimization researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Florida A&M-Florida State University College of Engineering examined ways to more strategically locate collection boxes and improve access. The group published the results of its mathematical modeling efforts in a paper in the journal Optimization and Engineering.
“Everyone would like to benefit from this kind of infrastructure,” says Monica Rico, a PhD student in industrial and systems engineering at UW-Madison. “If they’re not being used, that’s wasted opportunity and money.”
Currently, collection boxes are located in a largely ad hoc manner, leaving “deserts”—disproportionately in rural areas, notes Rico.
“Research also suggests rural communities need these boxes the most, because they suffer more from that overprescription of opioids,” says Rico, a Los Angeles native who’s in her fourth year in Professor Laura Albert’s lab.
Rico, Albert and alumna Veronica White (MSIE ’19, PhDIE ’24), now an assistant professor at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, built and analyzed variants of a mathematical model designed to strategically locate collection boxes. Their base model maximized coverage by ensuring a collection box within a 15-minute drive of a given location, but they also tweaked the model to offer locations other than police stations (which can be an intimidating location, deterring users), and to operate within a given financial budget.
Naturally, the researchers used Wisconsin as a case study, finding that adding 170 boxes statewide could eliminate all deserts. If building a network of collection boxes from scratch, they could sufficiently cover the state with about 80 fewer boxes than the current statewide total.
The project is an outgrowth of work that Albert and White have done using modeling to evaluate substance-use disorder treatment programs in the context of the opioid crisis.
Rico and Albert hope it can offer a roadmap for policymakers when devising public health initiatives.
“Making collection box decisions strategically is key to making a difference,” says Albert. “When collection boxes are sited using mathematical models and data instead of an ad hoc process based on guesswork, there are fewer deserts and more people are served. Strategy turns good intentions into real impact.”
Top photo caption: PhD student Monica Rico. Photo: Joel Hallberg