Drugs in municipal wastewater in Europe: source data

Analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community is a developing field, involving scientists working in different research areas, including analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology. This data is collected by scientitistand experts in a Europe-wide network (Sewage analysis CORe group — Europe (SCORE)). Data from a range of cities is available and has been collected since 2011.

For more details on this data, including data visualisations, methodology and analysis, please see: Wastewater analysis and drugs — a European multi-city study

General notes on the data

• Population-normalised loads: All values indicate the amount of drug residues quantified in raw sewage. No values were corrected with excretion factors.
• Cities with multiple sewage treatment plants (STPs): The numbers or letters in brackets specify the STPs, which provided data for the corresponding city in this study. For example, Berlin (4) indicates the population-weighted average of four different STPs in the city of Berlin.
• Values below limit of quantification: Values below the method limit of quantification are indicated as zero.
• Weekday means are averages of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
• Weekend means are averages of Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.
• Usually, there is at least one sample taken on each weekday. In case data is missing for a day, the averages are calculated over non-missing observations.

Using the data

• The data may be re-used in your own work provided the source (EMCDDA and SCORE) are acknowledged.
• In addition to data values, a site information table is provided with information on the treatment plants where the measurements were made. Each site is identified with a unique arbitrary ID ('SiteID'), which provides information on the location of the site, the institution responsible and the approximate population served (the population values presented are indicative only and not necessarily the ones used at the time of the collection). This ID is referred to in each data table.

Substance-specific notes

• Benzoylecgonine: this is the main excreted metabolite of cocaine.
• THC-COOH: this is the main excreted metabolite of cannabis.