Most excretion occurs via urine, so it wouldn't be entirely impossible. But daily urine volume is 1-2 liters. And urine starts to smell nasty after a few hours. Also, there are thousands of widely-used drugs, legal and illegal. Even focusing the most damaging ones, that's some serious chemistry.
So filtration seems the best approach. And I see this:
> A new filter membrane based on a covalent organic framework (COF) could help clean up drug-laden wastewater (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201802276).
> The medicines we take often end up in sewage. Wastewater treatment plants struggle to remove these compounds before releasing water back into the environment. Scientists worry that when these molecules end up in the environment, they might contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance or disrupt development in aquatic animals.
> COFs are crystalline porous networks made from small organic elements covalently linked together. They are similar to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are finding uses in hydrogen storage and catalysis. COFs have been used in similar applications, but Jürgen Caro of Leibniz University Hannover thought the materials could make good nanofilters.
Most excretion occurs via urine, so it wouldn't be entirely impossible. But daily urine volume is 1-2 liters. And urine starts to smell nasty after a few hours. Also, there are thousands of widely-used drugs, legal and illegal. Even focusing the most damaging ones, that's some serious chemistry.
So filtration seems the best approach. And I see this:
> A new filter membrane based on a covalent organic framework (COF) could help clean up drug-laden wastewater (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201802276).
> The medicines we take often end up in sewage. Wastewater treatment plants struggle to remove these compounds before releasing water back into the environment. Scientists worry that when these molecules end up in the environment, they might contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance or disrupt development in aquatic animals.
> COFs are crystalline porous networks made from small organic elements covalently linked together. They are similar to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are finding uses in hydrogen storage and catalysis. COFs have been used in similar applications, but Jürgen Caro of Leibniz University Hannover thought the materials could make good nanofilters.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i14/COF-filters-small-organi...