Managing emissions of active pharmaceutical ingredients from manufacturing facilities: an environmental quality standard approach.

Active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) residues have been found to be widespread in the aquatic environment, albeit in most cases at trace levels, with the route to the environment predominantly being via therapeutic use and subsequent excretion to sewer. Although manufacturing discharges may be a low overall contributor to environmental concentrations, they need to be managed effectively so that they do not adversely affect the local receiving environment. In order to achieve this, a risk-based approach is proposed that identifies the long-term and short-term concentrations, referred to as environmental reference concentrations (ERCs) and maximum tolerable concentrations (MTCs), respectively, of an API which should not be exceeded in the aquatic environment receiving effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturing sites.