The old women’s public loos in Ilminster look set to be given a new lease of life. South Somerset District Council, which owns the property, has spent several months trying to lease it out but now planning permission has been applied for seeking a change of use from public toilets to storage.

The building would be used to store paperwork and equipment. No medicines will be stored there but there will be one chest freezer to store clinical waste, which will be collected once a week by a commercial waste disposal company.

http://www.thisisthewestcountry.co.uk/news/9330321.New_life_for_ladies__loos_in_Ilminster/

I doubt there will be any clinical wastes whatsoever. Even with out gloriously hot summers and unseasonably warm autumn weather very few clinical wastes ever need refrigeration and almost never frozen storage. This waste may be placentas, but is surely more likely to be roadkill.

A fridge may be good, but a freezer is unnecessary. If an old freezer was lying around unused then there may be some justification, and it might be enough to reduce seepage of blood and other fluids but bags should be suitably to prevent seepage at all times.

The store must be properly secured. It would be wonderful if the DC could make arrangements to provide also a secure dropbox for drug waste also. This would of course serve the community, and the environment, removing POMs and OTC products, and perhaps some drugs of abuse, to reduce the incidence of accidental or deliberate poisoning and contamination of wastewater and sewerage, and of landfill, with drug residues that may find their way through these most basic treatments to contaminate the environment.

Of course. there will be a cost, of construction and maintenance and a cost of disposal. It will be money well spent, though I imagine that squabbling between different agencies – DC and CC, PCTs and other health trusts, Environment Agency, water company etc – will get in the way of and block this most valuable approach to disposal of waste pharmaceuticals.