99 Bottles of Erythromycin on the Wall

It’s been my last week of work in aquaculture and I’ve been working on re-plumbing a second major system of huge fish tanks. Things were on hold today because of some parts I had ordered that won’t come in until tomorrow. Instead, I got assigned to help with disposing of some chemicals.

There is a storage room in the lab stocked with cases of antibiotics: erythromycin to be exact. Each case contains 12 1-liter bottles, and there are over 100 cases in there: all expired five years ago. It’s labeled for use with bovine respiratory infection, though the lab used to work with whirling disease, so I imagine that was what it was used for. Someone must have made a serious miscalculation in ordering; otherwise I can’t imagine why they’d end up with extra pallets full of it. And because it contains antibotics, it can’t be dumped down the drain, so the safety office on campus must collect and dispose of this chemical waste. I don’t know what happens after they come pick up the 5-gallon jugs, but my job was to empty these bottles into the waste jugs. Liter by liter, I filled six jugs today (in a hood because it also contains ethyl acetate) and wondered if my money as a taxpayer had gone to this study that purchased a gross excess of antibotics. I think I poured out $8,000 dollars in erythromycin today and barely made a dent in the stockpile.