All the Waste We Cannot See: The Healthcare Industry’s Unseen One Health Challenge

By Reashika Das, Dr. Floriane Leseur & Dr. Samantha Alex Gordine

Landfills and incinerators let waste disappear, but its effects keep spreading. We caution the healthcare industry to rethink how it manages waste before its impact impedes a healthy future.

Out of sight, still our problem

Every day, tons of pharmaceutical and MedTech waste end up in landfills or incinerators worldwide. Expired medicines, chemical sludge, and single-use plastics vanish from company reports with one click: treated. However, waste disappearing from sight does not mean the problem is gone. While the healthcare industry claims compliance and sustainability, the environmental and health risks continue quietly, leaching into landfills and spreading through emissions. In the sector built on healing, it is striking how easily its toxic byproducts are hidden. This article looks at the industry’s reliance on landfills and incinerators, the limits of sustainability reporting, and why we need a different approach to accountability and waste management.

India: exporting medicine, importing waste

India makes over 60% of the world’s vaccines and a large share of active pharmaceutical ingredients. But while it exports life-saving drugs, it also takes on a huge part of the industry’s environmental burden. In Hyderabad’s Patancheru-Bollaram belt, decades of unchecked pharma production have made rivers toxic and aquifers into chemical sinks.⁴

Larsson et al. (2007) found that treated wastewater from Hyderabad drug factories had levels of ciprofloxacin higher than those in patients’ bloodstreams⁵. Waste does not vanish, it becomes an invisible threat entering water, food, and ecosystems. This is not just a problem in the developing world or emerging economies; global supply chains export risk while profits flow elsewhere.

In Goa, Cipla faced community complaints about chemical smells and health issues linked to waste dumping and incineration. The company denied wrongdoing, but environmental and reputational damage was done. Landfills and incinerators act as a cloak, letting companies tick compliance boxes while local communities bear the cost.⁶

Landfilling and burning is against sustainability

Sustainability reporting is now a key requirement and tool for the industry, but it often only tells part of the story. Terms like “treated waste” or “incinerated material” rarely explain the processes involved and the resulting downstream effects of treatment and incineration. Incinerators may shrink waste, but they release toxins. Landfills hide waste but do not stop long-lasting chemicals from leaching. Both reinforce a linear model: consume, discard, repeat.

Sustainability frameworks, and especially inconsistent financially driven ESG benchmarks, need to move beyond numbers to measure real environmental outcomes. The industry needs to close the health gap created by its waste and shift from cradle-to grave to cradle-to-cradle, i.e. transitioning to making waste a circular solution.

Breaking the loop: better ways forward

Sustainability cannot rely on containment alone. Given its embedded mission to improve health, the pharma and wider healthcare industry has responsibility but also the resources to prevent, recover, and reuse waste.

For example, GSK’s Montrose facility in Scotland cut hazardous waste by over 80% with solvent recovery systems.⁷ Advanced oxidation processes can break down active ingredients in wastewater without creating new pollution. On-site modular treatment units help offshore facilities. Green chemistry⁸, as well as Green engineering principles⁹ are slowly being integrated into drug design, starting in R&D labs and continuing all the way through to manufacturing. Digital platforms and tools to support effective waste management such as Chemishield already exist. These tools provide organisations with solutions to track, categorise, and control waste streams across their entire lifecycle

Adoption of such waste minimisation and management practices is slow, often due to short-term thinking and cost. Yet the examples above show: they are available, possible and impactful. Getting waste experts involved can actually help companies shift from reactive disposal to proactive waste strategies and transforming waste from a problem into a solution.

Experts overview: from oversight to foresight

As a first step, the pharma and healthcare industry needs to see the full picture of its waste, far beyond regulatory reporting. Mapping waste from generation to disposal exposes inefficiencies, leakages, and unmonitored risks. Next, benchmarking against best practices then helps companies move from reaction to strategy.

Closed-loop systems like in-line solvent capture, source segregation, and predictive analytics help embed sustainability strategy into practice. For example, AstraZeneca’s Södertälje site in Sweden tracks active ingredients to ensure no untreated waste leaves the facility.¹⁰ This shift from oversight to foresight protects both the environment and industry’s legitimacy.

It’s time to stop burning what we don’t want to see

The pharma and MedTech industry markets itself as a guardian of human health, but its past and current waste practices tell a different story. Landfills and incinerators hide waste but do not stop their impact, ranging from antibiotic resistance in rivers to chemical exposure in communities. Sustainability reporting and monitoring must evolve to address what waste does, not just how much of it is managed and outsourced.

The path forward is transparency, circularity, and accountability. The industry must see waste as a reflection of ethical and environmental responsibility, not a problem to hide. Radical accountability, visibility over volume, long-term impact over cost, and community engagement over legal compliance are essential.

Burning what we do not want to see risks poisoning the future of medicine itself. A healthy society cannot thrive on a poisoned planet, and the healthcare industry should understand that first and act accordingly.

What Arcondis can do to help?

Arcondis supports pharmaceutical manufacturers in developing strategic, compliant, and sustainable waste management frameworks, including wastewater, that align with both regulatory and sustainability objectives. By combining engineering expertise, data analytics, and regulatory knowledge, Arcondis helps clients identify contamination sources, assess effluent composition, and evaluate technology options such as Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs), Supercritical Water Oxidation (SCWO), and membrane-based treatments. Through process mapping, risk assessment and with digital tools, we enable our clients to implement scalable, modular and smart solutions that minimise environmental impact while maintaining operational efficiency.

Additionally, our Sustainability Solutions Team develops Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) models, implementing sustainable lab practices with My Green Lab certifications, benchmarking technologies against e.g. cost metrics, and designing data-driven dashboards to monitor discharge compliance and performance in real time. By integrating sustainability into core operations, such as labs and manufacturing, Arcondis helps turn regulatory requirements and the healthcare industry’s native necessity for environmental protection into long-term opportunities for innovation, resilience, and One Health benefits.

By integrating sustainability into core operations, beyond technical solutions, Arcondis provides end-to-end project management, stakeholder alignment, and change management support to ensure smooth adoption of sustainable practices.