“Water quality across Europe is increasingly being adversely affected by waste products and pollutants caused by the pharmaceutical industry, according to an expert.
“Friedrich Barth of the European Water Partnership told EurActiv that micropollution caused by residues from drugs, antibiotics and pills are becoming a pressing problem that could be affecting human health.
Wastewater produced by hospitals and drug development centres is mixing into rivers and lakes and could be causing environmental effects such as hormone imbalance in aquatic life, while some of the agents may be carcinogenic.
Mr Barth noted that there is currently no environmental legislation in the EU directly addressing this issue, suggesting that potentially contaminated wastewater of this kind should be collected and treated separately.
All very true, and of course there is no reason to exclude hospitals and related waste disposal activities from consideration. However, the present regulatory arrangements – formal or ‘informal’ – are based on a very much over-stated case.
Of course, hospitals discharge much pharmaceutical residues in wastewater since patients are excreting in their urine residues of the many drugs given to them. In-line exchange resin treatments may be warranted.
Clinical waste treatments using ATT processes might contain some, but very small residues that are of no significance though this is being used to apply undue pressure to operators. 
Based on spurious officialdom that may be intended to manipulate the industry rather than being predicated on sound scientific principals, the present arrangements might best be described as a mis-use of science, or at worse a scurrilous mis-use of the regulatory process.
Context is everything. What is overlooked, or perhaps intentionally ignored, is the environmental impact of the drugs excreted in urine by millions of patients treated by their GP and others. This enters the sewage treatment system without pre-treatment and passes through largely unchanged. The vast tonnages of drug substance given to animals, for husbandry and other veterinary commercial purposes, goes straight to land and doesn’t even get near the sewage system!