People who take prescription medications on regular basis can end up with a lot of empty pill bottles. Throwing them in the trash would mean they end up on the landfill where they'll be for centuries. Recycling and reusing them are better ideas, but as recycling companies often don't accept them because of the medication residue, you might have to find alternative ways for doing it.

Medication bottles can easily be reused for storing small objects around the house - buttons, pins, sewing needles, beads, paper clips, screws, seeds for garden, loose change. The possibilities are endless, just remember not to store food-items, e.g. candy in them. This can confuse children. Before storing anything in it, you can wash and dry them and soak off the label that has lots of sensitive information about you.

Yet you might still end up with too many containers in your home. One way of reusing them is asking around to see if your or any other pharmacy takes them back. Maybe they would like to use it to put your refills into the same bottle? Often veterinarians, free clinics and homeless shelters appreciate bottles that they can reuse. Call around to find a place where you could drop your bottles off once you've got too many to store (once a year, or once a month, depending on how many bottles accumulate in your home). Always remember to soak the labels off or use a permanent marker to mark out all personal information.

If your local recycling center doesn't accept pill bottles, you can see if there's a Whole Foods in your area that would. They participate in a Gimme 5 project that collects and recycles #5 plastic (many prescription bottles are that) by turning it into plastic pellets and makes them into common household products.

In case the search in your area for drop-off is unsuccessful, mail your bottles to Jacob Willard who donates them to a free clinic in his neighbourhood.