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Paper Short Abstract:

Pharmaceuticals may heal humans, but become toxic downstream. Where is this problem tackled—in wastewater treatment plants, or upstream in hospitals, houses or labs? We trace what ‘cleaning’ is in different sites where the ecotoxicity of pharmaceuticals becomes a matter of concern.

Paper Abstract:

While pharmaceuticals combat diseases in human bodies, when they are peed out and travel downstream, they become toxic to aquatic life.

This article traces attempts at cleaning pharmaceuticals from water downstream to upstream, from wastewater treatment plants to doctor’s practices and pharmaceutical labs. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands, we attend to how ‘cleaning’ becomes different things at different points of the stream. In wastewater treatment, cleaning is a matter of 'removing' through one technology or another, although ‘removal’ also displaces the matter into air or soil. For doctors, cleaning is primarily about 'prevention' or 'moderation', prescribing less while simultaneously attending to the needs of the individual patient. In pharmaceutical research, cleaning is about '(re)designing' a compound that has the ability to clean itself away by breaking down, but it also needs to work well in the body.

By contrasting various cleaning arrangements, the article aims to challenge the idea of cleaning as a linear process, as the 'removal' of a material that happens to be there, objectively present. Instead, we resituate 'cleaning' in a web of folded practices—removing, preventing, (re)designing—each of which comes with its own politics and clashing ‘goods.’ We propose that for an anthropology in a toxic world, it is essential to foster attention to where problems to do with toxic inheritances are tackled and what the political limitations and affordances of these ‘wheres’ are.