One of the options often used to wisely consume water is recycling: collecting water that has been used once, often by residents for excretion, clean it, and send it back for more use. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Not always, as Anthony King reports in NewScientist (17 September 2016, paywall):
Excreted and flushed through our sewage works and waterways, drug molecules are all around us. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water.
The amounts that end up in your glass are minuscule, and won’t lay you low tomorrow. However, someone prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health?
“We don’t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,” says Klaus Kümmerer at the University of Lüneburg, Germany.
Even what we might consider fresh water isn’t so fresh:
Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb).
Back in 2013, Scientific American reprinted a report from Environmental Health News on the efficacy of water treatment facilities:
Only about half of the prescription drugs and other newly emerging contaminants in sewage are removed by treatment plants.
That’s the finding of a new report by the International Joint Commission, a consortium of officials from the United States and Canada who study the Great Lakes.
The impact of most of these “chemicals of emerging concern” on the health of people and aquatic life remains unclear. Nevertheless, the commission report concludes that better water treatment is needed.
“The compounds show up in low levels – parts per billion or parts per trillion – but aquatic life and humans aren’t exposed to just one at a time, but a whole mix,” said Antonette Arvai, physical scientist at the International Joint Commission and the lead author of the study. “We need to find which of these chemicals might hurt us.”
The NewScientist report explored the possibility of less stable drugs (i.e., shelf-life), which might make pharmaceuticals more resource intensive (in my view), so I wonder if an alternative would be to require the pharmaceutical companies to also do the research to discover how to remove the remnants of their drugs from the water supply – or to guarantee the human body completely absorbs it. Extra points if they can report that common treatment options already remove the drug remains.
