PHARMACEUTICALS AND PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS IN THE ENVIRONMENT: AN OVERVIEW – POLLUTION FROM PERSONAL ACTIONS, ACTIVITIES, AND BEHAVIORS –

Perhaps more so than with any other class of pollutants, the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in the environment highlights the immediate, intimate, and inseparable connection between the personal activities of individual citizens and their environment. PPCPs, in contrast to other types of pollutants, owe their origins in the environment directly to their worldwide, universal, frequent, highly dispersed, and individually small but cumulative usage by multitudes of individuals – as opposed to the larger, highly delineated, and more controllable industrial manufacturing/usage of most high-volume synthetic chemicals.

Many PPCPs can enter the environment following ingestion or application by the user or administration to domestic animals. Disposal of unused/expired PPCPs in landfills and in domestic sewage is another route to the environment. The aquatic environment serves as the major, ultimate receptacle for these chemicals, for which little is known with respect to actual or potential adverse effects. Domestic sewage treatment plants are not specifically engineered to remove PPCPs, and the efficiencies with which they are removed vary from nearly complete to ineffective. While PPCPs in the environment (or domestic drinking water) are not regulated, and even though their concentrations are extremely low (ng/L-µg/L), the consequences of exposure over multiple generations to multiple compounds having different as well as similar modes of action prompts a plethora of questions. While the environmental issues involved with antibiotics and sex steroids are the most widely recognized, numerous other therapeutic and consumer-use classes of PPCPs pose additional environmental concerns.

While the occurrence of PPCPs in the environment is not new (undoubtedly having taken place ever since any given PPCP has enjoyed commercial use), the continual advancement in the capabilities of analytical chemistry to identify ever-lower concentrations (and increasing polarities) of pollutants has elucidated the issue only over the last decade or so. The U.S. EPA and other U.S. federal and state agencies are just beginning to consider the many scientific issues involved with this multifaceted environmental concern.