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The active ingredient in most birth control pills winds up in rivers, lakes and estuaries, where it can harm wildlife.
After the active ingredient in most birth control pills has done its duty preventing pregnancy, it begins a second life as a pollutant that can harm wildlife in waterways.
Not only is ethinyl estradiol quite potent - creating "intersex" fish and amphibians - but it is very difficult to remove from wastewater, which carries it into natural waterways.
Since women around the planet
take the pill, this is a global problem. The European Union is the first entity to seriously consider mandating the removal of ethinyl estradiol, also known as EE2, from wastewater. However, as researchers pointed out in Thursday's (May 24) issue of the journal
Nature, the question of whether to remove the pollutant is not simple.
The dilemma
The problem is effectively removing ethinyl estradiol can be quite costly. Governmental estimates put the cost of upgrading about 1,360 wastewater treatment plants across England and Wales so they can comply with a proposed limit at between $41 billion and $47 billion (€32 billion and €37 billion), according to Richard Owen, a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
"The big question is, 'Are we willing to pay this as a society?'" Owen told LiveScience. "Or, alternatively, 'would we prefer to live with
the environmental impact?'"
In their
Nature commentary, Owen and Susan Jobling, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Brunel, write that more public debate is needed on the proposed regulation.
They intended to draw attention to this environmental dilemma, not to suggest that women should not have access to birth control, Owen told LiveScience.
