In the minutes before her social psychology exam last semester, Shrayder Fischer, an IU junior studying clinical psychology, reached into her backpack for a pencil and accidentally pricked herself on a used needle.
“It like, bled all over my hand,” Fischer said. “I was like, ‘oh my gosh, everyone is looking at me, I have blood on me, I look so crazy.’”
This wasn’t the first time a used needle injured Fischer. Fischer has Type 1 diabetes, and from August 2023 to November 2024 she injected insulin up to 6 times a day, and constantly needed a container for the needles. If she forgot to pack a container, Fischer said she’d have to leave the needles in her bag.
“I can't even tell you how many times I would, like, dig through my backpack to either find a pen or a pencil or just a book, or even just to clean them out after a week or so, and I would poke myself with my needles,” Fischer said.
Used sharps, including hypodermic needles for medical injections, require safe storage in an FDA-cleared container made of puncture-resistant, leak-proof plastic. If thrown in the trash, used needles can cause injury and spread infection.
Some colleges, including the University of Iowa and DePaul University, install sharps boxes in public facilities like bathrooms. These containers, which are typically tamper- proof, can help provide safe disposal options for college students who take injections to treat medical conditions like diabetes, cancer, allergies or migraines.
Fischer said she’s never encountered options for sharps storage in any of IU’s public facilities. Neither has Lilly Grimes, a sophomore and founder of the Type One Society. Grimes injected insulin up to or more than a dozen times a day during her freshman year and often struggled to store her used needles.
“I would just have to carry used needles in my backpack or my purse,” Grimes said. “It's very scary, just like reaching in your bag, you could maybe poke yourself with a used needle.”
Grimes said carrying used needles her freshman year also became a source of social anxiety, and meant she frequently had to explain her medical circumstances to people she barely knew.
She was glad for the opportunity to increase visibility for diabetes, which she said can be a “silent struggle.” But Grimes also wished she’d had disposal boxes in bathrooms on campus, which could also increase students’ awareness of conditions like diabetes while lifting the daily burden of needle disposal for students who use medical injections.
In 2023, current sophomore Lauren Holman gave a speech for her business presentations class about her experience carrying used needles home. Holman, who uses injections to treat eczema, told her class she wanted to improve disposal options on campus.
Holman’s professor, Shelly Scott-Harmon, said she was startled that IU Bloomington did not have more options for sharps disposal.
“I and the rest of the class, her classmates, were like, this just makes sense. Why is this not a thing?” Scott-Harmon said. “So I told her at the end of the semester, I said, ‘you know, if you ever want to pursue this, I'd be happy to support you in that any way I can.’”
Scott-Harmon said she worries for the safety of students, faculty and visitors alike, and she wants sharps disposal to be more publicly accessible on campus.
Beginning in spring 2024, Holman and Scott-Harmon met up to investigate solutions. But in the year since, Scott-Harmon said they haven’t made much progress.
Scott-Harmon first reached out to IU Housing, and while the IU Housing website states that its center desks offer containers for needle disposal to residents, Scott-Harmon said representatives told them needle storage boxes were not installed in public locations due to concerns about tampering.
Scott-Harmon also said she contacted representatives with the Accessible Educational Services and the student health center, who did not provide her the locations of any publicly accessible sharps disposal boxes.
Drew Bogenschutz, director of AES, said over email that while AES works with students to provide classroom accessibility measures on a case-by-case basis, students are responsible for providing personal medical devices, including sharps storage containers.
Julia Nowak, IU Police Department patrol officer and public information officer, said over email that IU Environmental Health and Safety does not manage sharps boxes for personal medical use.
Scott-Harmon said she’s not sure where to turn.
“Everybody seems to think somebody else, you know, should be doing it,” Scott-Harmon said.
Fischer said she would like to see IU install sharps disposal boxes in campus buildings, to increase accessibility and take the burden off of people who need injections.
“Having any sort of illness or accessibility, quote unquote, issue, is hard enough as is,” Fischer said. “To not have a proper place to put the things that I need to survive is like, it kind of wears down.”
