Health Care Without Harm is calling for EU rules for waste medicines to be harmonised and strengthened, after a survey of six member states revealed wide discrepancy in collection practices.

Under the 2004 medicinal products directive, member states must implement appropriate collection schemes for unused pharmaceutical products. But the directive gives no guidelines on how to implement such schemes.more–>

Consumer awareness of waste medicine collection schemes ranged from 37% in the UK to 85% in Portugal, HCWH found. The study pointed to a strong correlation between awareness and use of such schemes.

This supports the opinions expressed over many years on the Clinical Waste Discussion Forum, when we have called for better community take-back scheme that would be far more common if it were not too difficult for the Environment Agency to grapple with.

HCWH is is an international coalition of hospitals and health care systems, medical professionals, community groups, health-affected constituencies, labor unions, environmental and environmental health organizations and religious groups. Though there are concerns about their political campaigning activities that owe more to ideology than sound science, their aims are largely laudable and their work without doubt invaluable.

But why call for improvement in drug waste disposal? That alone is a diffuse issue that requires attention involving healthcare waste disposal and other hospital effluents – don’t forget that the majority of drug waste leaving hospitals is in urine flowing down the foul sewer! And also domiciliary outputs, as the excreted contribution to the burden on sewage treatments, but also flushed down the toilet or dropped into a black sack as unwanted product. As we have discussed previously, there should be no distinction between prescription and non-prescription medicines as the environmental and other impacts are much the same.

The EU might find some inventive approach to ensuring harmonisation of disposal practices across member states. It would have to provide some direction to avoid individual interpretation by member states that inevitably results in substantial devaluation of the scheme that might be simply ignored by some who can’t really afford it and have a cavalier attitude toward EU interventions, and over-enthusiastic application by those individuals working for individual government agencies who believe that they have a degree of autonomy to implement guidelines in their own image. Neither is appropriate, but nor too is the do nothing approach.