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Short abstract:

Pharmaceuticals may heal human bodies, but become toxic downstream. Where is this problem tackled—in wastewater treatment plants, hospitals, households, or pharmaceutical laboratories? This paper traces what ‘cleaning’ is in different sites where pharmaceutical ecotoxicity is a matter of concern.

Long abstract:

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

This paper traces attempts at cleaning pharmaceuticals from water, starting with wastewater treatment plants and moving up the stream to doctors’ practices and pharmaceutical labs. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands, we attend to how caring for clean water is done differently 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 also needs to work well in the body.

By contrasting various cleaning arrangements, the paper 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 it is essential to foster attention to where problems to do with pollution are tackled and what practical/political limitations and affordances these ‘wheres’ bring.