Water UK has updated and republished its “guidance” regarding healthcare waste water discharges that might apply to healthcare premises and might no doubt be extrapolated to healthcare waste treatment facilities also.
The document has no legal status, despite a clear attempt to present it as such. It is the work of a 100% commercially funded trade representative body.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. It might be considered at least to hint toward best practice but is badly flawed, letting itself down by a palpable lack of knowledge regarding hospital practice, drugs and drug administration. Those who are responsible for the next version of this document, hopefully to be produced without delay, should seek a suitably experienced healthcare professional to advice and research the document compilation, and provide a competent list of chemicals considered safe or not. Presently, the list is incomplete and more so is irrational in its construct, with misspellings and other errors suggesting that its compiler(s) don’t really understand what they are dealing with.
At least, in its latest reincarnation, Water UK has shifted from you MUST NOT discharge to you should query and likely discharge with your water service provider. After all, it is not a regulatory body. But if it seeks to represent the water companies one would think they could get things right. If not, why would the trade bodies subscribe to its continued financial support?
At least this time Water UK has chosen not to include a lengthy list of pharmaceuticals that must not be discharged in wastewater, which subsequently encouraged the Environment Agency to fuss about empty vials and IV tubing, syringes etc which had but no longer contained those drugs, save in de minimis concentration.
It is important to consider the cumulative effect of all discharges and thus every possible source, but this does seem to be misguided when the fate of each one of those hundreds of pharmaceutical products would be to enter the sewer via urinary excretion. Since it is the norm that >95% of the administered dose of each drug substance is excreted in urine, with the remainder excreted as metabolites, the few molecules of surviving substance in an empty drug vial seem to be beyond consideration.
And since we do excrete in urine almost all of each pharmaceutical administered to man, and following administration of drugs to animals also, does Water UK in future wish to prevent us all having a pee?