Pharmacy
Environmental impacts

In 2022 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development proposed that pharmaceutical companies should be required to collect and destroy unused or expired medicines that they have put on the market in order to reduce public health risks around the misuse of medicines obtained from waste bins, the development of antimicrobial resistant bacteria from the discharge of antibiotics into environmental systems and "economic losses" from wasted healthcare resources. Potentially harmful concentrations of pharmaceutical waste has been detected in more than a quarter of water samples taken from 258 rivers around the world. OECD recommend that medicines should be collected separately from household waste and that "marketplaces and redistribution platforms for unused close-to-expiry-date medicines" should be set up. Such extended producer responsibility schemes are already running in France, Spain and Portugal.
detectable_content:postscript, length_constraints:number_words[224], punctuation:no_comma