Water pollution from pharmaceutical use in livestock farming: Assessing differences between livestock types and production systems.

Abstract

Livestock production is a major source of pharmaceutical emissions to the environment. The current scientific discourse focusses on measuring and modelling emissions as well as assessing their risks. While several studies evidence the severity of pharmaceutical pollution resulting from livestock farming, differences in pollution between livestock types and production systems are largely unknown. In fact, there is no comprehensive analysis of factors influencing pharmaceutical use - the emission's source - in the diverse production systems. To address these knowledge gaps, we develop a framework to investigate pharmaceutical pollution from different livestock production systems and apply it in a first pilot assessment to compare pollution from organic and conventional cattle, pig and chicken production systems on selected indicator substances, covering antibiotics, antiparasitics, hormones and NSAIDs. Given lacking statistics, hereto we retrieved novel qualitative information about influential factors for pharmaceutical use and pollution from expert interviews combined with quantitative data on a.o. the environmental behavior of specific substances from literature. Our analysis shows that factors across a pharmaceutical's entire lifecycle influence pollution. However, not all factors are livestock type or production system dependent. The pilot assessment furthermore reveals that differences in pollution potential between conventional and organic production exist, but for antibiotics, NSAIDs (and partially antiparasitics) some factors lead to higher pollution potential in conventional, others in organic systems. For hormones we identified a comparatively higher pollution potential from conventional systems. Among the indicator substance, the assessment over the entire pharmaceutical lifecycle illustrated that flubendazole in broiler production has the highest per unit impact. The framework and its application in the pilot assessment generated insights useful to identify which substances, livestock types, production systems, or the combination thereof have high or low pollution potential, informing more sustainable agricultural management practices. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;00:0-0. © 2023 SETAC.