System odbioru przeterminowanych i niewykorzystanych leków w województwie pomorskim - raport

This report presents the first comprehensive assessment of how expired and unused medicines are collected across the Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland. All 123 municipalities were covered using freedom-of-information requests and official documents published in Public Information Bulletins. Data were collected between February and August 2026 and cover the years 2023–2025.

At least 595 active collection points were identified, and municipalities documented at least 250.4 tonnes of medicines collected over the three-year period, with annual volumes rising from 71.8 t in 2023 to 87.7 t in 2025. Five organisational models were distinguished. Accessibility of collection points, rather than the legal form of the system, emerged as the factor most closely associated with reported volumes: the median was 24.5 g per capita per year in pharmacy-based systems against 5.7 g where collection relied solely on municipal waste collection points. Nine municipalities reported no collection at all in any of the three years.

The study also documents a systematic reporting gap in inter-municipal associations, where masses reported by member municipalities were ten to more than thirty times lower than the volumes actually documented by the association operating the system. A source dataset covering all 123 municipalities is published separately (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22035505).