Drug pollution

"Pharmaceutical pollution is now detected in waters throughout the world," said a scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

The portion that comes from expired or unneeded drugs that are flushed unused down the toilet is smaller, but it is also important, especially in hospitals (where its magnitude is greater than in residential contexts).

In the early 1990s, pharmaceuticals were found to be present in the environment, which resulted in massive scientific research, new regulations, and public attention.

Between 30 and 100 different pharmaceuticals were found present in the aforementioned waters in Thailand, Canada, Australia, India, China, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, France and Brazil.

[14] Pharmaceuticals are suspected to provoke long-term effects in aquatic ecosystems even at low concentration ranges (trace concentrations) because of their bioactive and chemically stable nature, which leads to recalcitrant behaviours in the aqueous compartments, a feature that is typically associated with the difficulty in degrading these compounds to innocuous molecules, similarly with the behaviour exhibited by persistent organic pollutants.

[17][18] In the last decades of the twentieth century, scientific research efforts have been fostered towards deeper understanding of the interactions of groundwater transport and attenuation mechanisms with the chemical nature of polluting agents.

[19] Amongst the multiple mechanisms governing solutes mobility in groundwater, biotransformation and biodegradation play a crucial role in determining the evolution of the system (as identified by developing concentration fields) in the presence of organic compounds, such as pharmaceuticals.

[20] Other processes that might impact on pharmaceuticals fate in groundwater include classical advective-dispersive mass transfer, as well as geochemical reactions, such as adsorption onto soils and dissolution / precipitation.

In places where environmental law and regulation are adequately enforced, the wastewater from the factories is cleaned to a safe level.

[23] But to the extent that the market rewards "looking the other way" in developing nations, whether through local corruption (bribed inspectors or regulators) or plausible deniability, such protections are circumvented.