According to the latest data provided by Eurostat, European Union countries will generate almost 230 million tonnes of municipal waste in 2023, a volume equivalent to filling 13,500 Santiago Bernabeu stadiums with waste.

World Recycling Day, which is celebrated every 17 May, aims to raise awareness about the proper treatment of the huge amount of waste we produce, thus helping to curb climate change and protect the environment and global health.

Household sorting is an essential part of the recycling process, and it is citizens who start the cycle. A start that can be compromised by doubts about recycling. Among them is the doubt about the final destination of the waste, which according to the latest citizen survey conducted for SIGRE, discourages up to 81% of the Spanish population when it comes to recycling.

It is for this reason that SIGRE, the non-profit organisation in charge of guaranteeing the correct environmental management of expired or unused medicines and their packaging generated in the home, carries out awareness campaigns and programmes to promote the proper use of medicines and the correct disposal of their waste through the SIGRE Point in pharmacies.

The SIGRE Point has a QR code that redirects to a landing where citizens can obtain information on the treatment of medicine waste. In this way, with a simple scan, the citizen can find out how, through reverse logistics, pharmaceutical distribution takes advantage of the distribution of new medicines to pharmacies to collect the waste deposited at the SIGRE Point and store them in their facilities. From there, authorised managers take them to the Medicine Packaging and Waste Sorting Plant.

At this plant, the application of artificial intelligence and robotics in the separation and classification of waste already allows almost 70 percent of the packaging to be recycled. A high percentage to which the pharmaceutical industry's efforts in eco-design also contribute. In the two decades that SIGRE has been in operation, pharmaceutical companies have implemented more than 3,500 initiatives in this area, making packaging more easily recyclable, among other environmental improvements.

Those packaging leftovers that cannot be recycled and medicine leftovers are used as a source of energy, thus avoiding the consumption of fossil fuels.

All leftover medicines are destroyed in order to comply with the current regulations on medicine donations, which prohibit the use of this waste for patients from any country.

"It is essential to promote a culture of recycling among the public," says Miguel Vega, general director of SIGRE. According to Vega, "Thanks to the joint efforts of the entire pharmaceutical sector, we have a convenient system close to our homes, which has all the health and environmental guarantees for the correct environmental treatment of medicine waste".