Pharmaceutical waste

Pharmaceutical waste, or ‘medicinal waste’, refers to any waste that is arriving from outdated drugs or medicines that requires disposal.

What is Pharmaceutical Waste?
A collection of discarded pharmaceutical products, including various pill bottles, blister packs, and syringes, placed in a labeled bin or container for proper disposal. The image highlights the importance of safe disposal of unused or expired medications to prevent environmental contamination and health risks.

What is Pharmaceutical Waste?

Pharmaceutical waste, or ‘medicinal waste’, refers to any waste that is arriving from outdated drugs or medicines that requires disposal. Through our many years of experience supporting healthcare customers with this waste, Reconomy is aware of just how crucial it is to provide a robust segregation system when handling large amounts of pharmaceutical waste. Typically, waste arriving from pharmaceutical practices will require segregation into two different containers, which we label: medicinal, cytotoxic, and cytostatic.

Disposal methods

How to dispose pharmaceutical waste

Pharmaceutical waste disposal is a specialist service that requires the upmost attention from our industry-expert partners. Below are some of the options available to help with disposing pharmaceutical waste

Pharmaceutical waste bins

Allowing your business to store and dispose of any pharmaceutical waste generated in a safe and secure way. This service is suitable for unwanted medications, typically if they are end-of-life or out-of-date.

Sharps bins

Sharps bins are another service commonly used in the healthcare industries to handle pharmaceutical waste disposal. These colour-coded bins and boxes are used to segregate healthcare waste being generated, ready for our team of expert partners to collect and dispose of in the most responsible way.

Our team of industry experts in the pharmaceutical waste category help with disposal of the following:

Medicinal waste

Using the colour coded segregation system, medicinal waste will always be found in containers with a blue lid on. This waste stream is for all medicines or outdated drugs that are classified in the ‘non-hazardous’ category, posing no risk to containing hazardous properties. This waste will always require disposal by incineration and cannot be recycled. The blue lid on the containers will help pharmaceutical practices separate this medicinal waste from anything that could contain cytotoxic or cytostatic properties, hazardous elements of pharmaceutical waste that will cause contamination.

Cytotoxic or cytostatic waste

Classified in containers with a purple lid, waste that contains cytotoxic or cytostatic properties will always require segregation from common medicinal waste. Reconomy commonly finds that this type of waste arrives from used needles or syringes that have been used in complex treatments on either humans and animals.

Other types of Pharmaceutical waste disposal we provide

Explore the other types of Pharmaceutical waste disposal Reconomy offers

Offensive waste
Anatomical waste
Dental waste disposal

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