Gendvilas, Vilius

Introduction: Pharmaceutical and veterinary medical waste are medical products that are usually destroyed because of their low quality, end of the expiration date, confiscation, or falsification. The amounts of these types of medical waste are significant. It is a substantial economic and ecological problem because destroying medical products requires special conditions. Consequently, it cost a lot of money for governments and pharmaceutical companies to dispose of these dangerous products. This issue also poses an enormous ecological threat due to the lack of information about the disposal of pharmaceutical waste as they usually are disposed of in general rubbish bins. Materials and methods: Literature analysis method was used to study, review and describe scientific articles, publications, studies, books and other literature related to the theme. The Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, PubMed databases were used to search the literature. Results: After analysing different literature and statistics about the disposal of drugs, some journals revealed that vast amounts of pharmaceutical waste are collected in a relatively short period of time. A one-year-long study was conducted in Australia by a project called “RUM”, during which researchers collected 704 tons of unwanted drugs from four medical facilities in their country. Another research was held by an organization called “SINGREM” which administrates about 25 countries with drug disposal. This organization showed that about 100.000 tons of unused drugs annually are discharged into the environment. This problem is also major in Europe because an investigation was done which included 21 countries and revealed that about 54% of people dump unused medicine in general waste or flush them into sewerage. Conclusions: In today's fast-moving world, society should be more informed about the harmful effects of inappropriate disposal of drugs. The study results showed [...].