Our collaboration project 'Closing Gaps: Techniques and solutions for reducing pharmaceutical residuals in the Baltic Sea region' presented its third workshop on February 9th in Vilnius (Lithuania), part of the first stepping stones towards preventative measures.
Representation came from all over the relevant sectors: pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, water management companies, NGOs, environmental protection agencies, technology developers, researchers, policy-making institutions and more.
Key messages included:
- The urgency of the topic for both health and the environment, and of dealing with the bottlenecks and gaps – there are effective techniques that are available as well as tested, and economic incentives that go along with them.
- The need to work in the interplay between environment-health-economy and to involve healthcare workers when attending to the issue(s).
- The importance of environmental risk assessments in the production of pharmaceuticals.
- And the equal importance of considering solutions' environmental impact, to avoid a technique solving the original problem yet causing harm elsewhere – like intensive energy use for ozonation.
We look forward to taking the next steps together. A special thank you to the host of the workshop LBTA (Lithuanian Biotechnology Association).
Partners in this project are us at NCSH, ScanBalt BioRegion and LBTA, in collaboration with Business Region Göteborg.
The project 'Closing gaps: Techniques and solutions for reducing pharmaceutical residuals in the Baltic Sea region' is funded by the Swedish Institute.
