Antibiotic Waste Calculator

Climate change and pollution affect over half of human infections via pathways including changes in vector ranges, biodiversity loss, and altered weather patterns. The U.S. healthcare sector causes disproportionately large greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, a large amount of which are from pharmaceuticals. Antimicrobials are among the most commonly administered medications and are resource-intensive throughout their lifespan.

Healthcare sustainability is a multidisciplinary field that seeks to mitigate healthcare’s environmental consequences. Antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare sustainability both aim to reduce wasteful resource use while maximizing patient safety. ID pharmacists are ideally positioned to integrate sustainability and stewardship, due to their role in therapeutic decision-making, knowledge of ID literature, and understanding of medication-use processes and pharmaceutical purchasing.

The calculators found through the below link serve two primary functions: 1) give an estimate of plastic waste generated for an individual patient antimicrobial regimen; 2) provide aggregate waste and emissions estimates for system-wide antimicrobial usage. Data inputs for the calculators were collected via weighing of plastic components used in both preparation and administration. Emissions data was estimated based on published literature. The formulas used for estimation are based on standard compounding practices found in inpatient pharmacies.