BENU’s new initiative calls for responsible management of expired or unused medicines

To prove the problem, this summer, the company, with the involvement of the University of Pécs and the University of Pannonia, also conducted fresh water quality research, which confirmed the presence of numerous active ingredients in our natural waters. With the social campaign “Don’t throw it away, bring it back!”, they aim to draw attention to the importance of this social issue.

A quarter of consumers throw out their expired medicines in household waste – this is revealed by the representative research conducted by BENU Hungary Zrt. this year. Another telling figure is that approximately a third of consumers are unaware of what happens to medicines that end up in household waste or the sewage system. Based on the results obtained, it can be stated that the population still does not have sufficient information about the correct way to dispose of expired medicines. This is also confirmed by the water sampling research carried out this summer. The active ingredients of drugs for the treatment of central nervous system diseases, antidepressants, antibiotics, contraceptives, blood pressure reducers, fungicides, anxiolytics and tranquilizers were detected by university researchers during the examination of the water of the Danube, the Tisza and our largest lake, Lake Balaton, among others.

The experts identified a total of 14 active ingredients from the three living waters – which cannot be filtered out by water purifiers – which can enter natural waters with discarded or flushed medicines in addition to urine. “Our water should not be our medicine” The contamination of surface and groundwater with pharmaceutical residues has now become a real, global environmental problem, the extent of which we can protect ourselves against by responsibly managing expired or unused medicines. BENU would like to raise awareness of this with its educational, social campaign starting in October this year. The pharmacies belonging to the network – where every fourth pharmacy purchase in Hungary takes place – have so far provided the public with the opportunity to hand in expired or unnecessary medicines in placed medicine collection boxes (like all pharmacies), but at the same time, the proportion of medicines that are improperly discarded is high and still causes significant environmental pollution in our country.