GREEN IDEAS...Creating an environmentally friendly pharmacy:

What can a pharmacist do?

Pharmacist can help to ensure that unused medications are returned to the pharmacy and dispose them appropriately through hazardous waste companies. By educating patients on proper disposal, pharmacists contribute significantly to preventing medications from entering the water supply.

By discouraging inappropriate use and overuse of prescription, nonprescription and alternative medications, pharmacists can help decrease the amount of medication that is purchased and eventually discarded, or unnecessarily ingested and excreted into our environment. For example, pharmacists may counsel patients to select single-entity cough and cold preparations that target their specific symptom(s), as opposed to multi-ingredient product that contain ingredients they do not need. With new prescription, it makes sense to limit initial prescription size and determine patient tolerability, thereby minimizing drug wastage.

What about the pharmaceutical industry?

The pharmaceutical industry has made progress over the past several years in practicing “green chemistry”, for example, by minimizing use of reagents that are hazardous to the environment and by designing alternate synthesis pathways. It is anticipated that they will extend these principles to product design, through such measures as increasing therapeutic efficacy by enhancing delivery to the target site, thus minimizing dosage required. The industry should be encouraged to investigate expiration dates to establish a maximum shelf life for a drug product, to minimize wastage.

Promote environmentally friendly products

Excipients: In many drug dosage forms, a number of excipients have not been examined for toxicity, and are excreted in one form or another into the environment. These include binders, fillers, lubricants, colours, sweeteners, suspending agents, preservatives and so on.

Preservatives: Parabens are among the most widely used preservatives in cosmetics (skin creams, tanning lotions etc), toiletries, pharmaceuticals and some foods. While not actually toxic, they appear to be weakly estrogenic. The risk from topical application is not known, but they may pose a risk for aquatic life.

Disinfectants/antiseptics: Triclosan is an antiseptic used in toothpaste, hand soap, and some acne creams and plastic products. It resists microbial degradation. Several other disinfectants (e.g., substituted phenolics) are used in hospitals, homes and by livestock breeders: some resist removal from sewage effluent and may be found in surface water.

Sunscreens: Some sunscreens have been identified in fat tissues in fish, as well as in human breast milk, indicating that these agents are absorbed through the skin and may bioconcentrate in aquatic species.

Personal care products: Little attention has been focused on the environmental fate of PCPs, such as perfumes, deodorants, antiperspirants, shampoos, soaps, sunscreens and cosmetics and their effects on nontarget organisms a(e.g., aquatic life). These products are supposed to have minimal biochemical activity, but may be used in quantities much higher than recommended and large volumes may enter our water supply.

In conclusion, every step an individual takes towards achieving a healthy environment is important. Our goal should be to reduce overall energy demand and consumption in our communities, and to consider the impact of everything that we do. It is up to us to convert our wasteful, throwaway society into one that cultivates our environment for future generations.

Some facts:

• A conventional plastic bag will take approximately 1,000 years to break down.

• In April 2007, leaf Rapids Manitoba, Canada, became the first town to enact a bylaw banning single-use plastic shopping bags: retailers can be fined up to $1,000 for giving away or selling these bags.

• Each year, Canadians discard more than 140,000 tonnes of electronic waste (e.g., computer equipment, phones, and televisions) into landfills, equivalent in weight to approximately 28,000 adult African elephants.

• About 70% of heavy metals found in landfills originates from discarded electronic equipment.