Waves of pharmaceutical waste

Abstract

The viral waves observed during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic are suggesting a new global phenomenon by which a global change, e.g., a viral wave, is inducing a wave of waste, that is a sudden rise of waste and associated pollution due to sharp and time-limited changes of human behavior. The originality of this phenomenon is that the crisis-here the pandemic-is fast and global, compared to previous crises which were slower, more restricted, and local, and that the crisis is limited in time, like a wave. This wave-of-waste phenomenon fits well with the entrance into the Anthropocene, theorized by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, where humans now influence the planet globally. Here we argue why such waves-of-waste are likely to occur more frequently in the next global crises, on the basis of the sudden rises of pharmaceutical waste observed during the pandemic.The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 (WHO 2020. Now more than two years into the pandemic, there have been more than 500 million confirmed cases, including over six million deaths around the globe, making it the largest public health crisis in the past one hundred years (WHO 2022a). With the recent emergence and spread of new variants, global weekly new infections surged to new records at the beginning of 2022 (Wang and Han 2022; WHO 2022a WHO , 2022b. The pandemic has strongly affected almost all countries, thus inducing an unprecedented sharp rise of waste production.

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