I thank the noble Lord; that is a temptation to be eagerly accepted. I was referring back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said in Committee and the example in Sweden of Stockholm county council, which grades medicines on their environmental effects. Doctors can choose to prescribe a drug that is less harmful in relation to the environment where that option exists.
We have also had the 2014 report by UK Water Industry Research, which found that in most of the 160 sewage treatment works studied, several common drugs were present in the final effluent in concentrations high enough to potentially affect ecosystems. The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, referred just now to the amount of pharmaceutical effluence entering waterways,
and according to a 2018 study by the Delft Institute for Water Education, that could increase by two-thirds before mid-century.
In Committee, my noble friend Lady Wheeler referred to the Environment Agency also having found examples of contaminated hospital waste being illegally exported to developing countries such as Malaysia for disposal. What steps are we taking to prevent the illegal export of such waste and ensure that we dispose of our own waste in this country? There are also concerns about the use of incinerators for hospital waste and the health impacts on those living nearby. We must ask whether the Government are doing enough to ensure that chemists and GPs’ surgeries provide a secure depository for unused medicines, so that they do not contaminate the water supply by being washed down the sink or ending up in landfill.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said today that the Government’s approach has been to say that legislation is already on the statute book regarding the impact on the environment more broadly, including legislation to address the impact of producing and disposing of manufactured goods such as medical devices. But there is a persuasive argument that we should go further and that it is appropriate that in this Bill on medicines and medical devices there should be a way of ensuring that the environmental impact is not a damaging one. I hope that the Minister can respond with a positive reflection that this is an area that needs further exploration.