Sustainable Procurement & CSR News - Pharmaceutical Industry

Social Sustainability performance is one of the three pillars of ESG. It assesses a company’s engagement with its workers, customers, suppliers, and the local community. It covers human rights, diversity and inclusion, health and safety, and community impact. Inattention to these factors can damage corporate brands and reputations and bring legal and regulatory penalties. Companies in every sector, including pharma, will need to make concerted efforts to improve their performance across all three ESG measures.

Bormioli Pharma has recently joined Glass Futures, a UK-based project that aims to develop a low CO2 emission approach to glass production.

The project, which will last ten years, will soon see the opening of a pilot furnace in the UK dedicated to the experimentation and application of these technologies.

"In a celebration year for glass, we are ready to confirm our role as innovators in the industry, with several concrete research and development initiatives," said Andrea Lodetti, CEO of Bormioli Pharma.

"This commitment is all the more important in a sector such as pharmaceuticals, where glass must not only contain, but also protect the therapeutic efficacy, and where the constant increase in production requires a serious rethinking of our responsibilities towards the environment."

Sustainability is a key pillar for Bormioli Pharma, which has committed to manufacturing 50% of its products using materials with low environmental impact by 2025.

Environmental sustainability performance is one of the three pillars of ESG, measuring the energy a company consumes, the waste it generates, the natural resources it uses, and the consequences for ecosystems and habitats Momentum is on the side of the sustainability movement. Citizens, governments, regulators, and the media are turning the spotlight on corporations and demanding action. Companies in every sector, including pharma, will need to make concerted efforts to improve their performance across all three ESG measures.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd., has recently announced that the company has been listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), under the category of emerging markets for the third consecutive year in a row.

DJSI is one of the world's most respected and widely accepted sustainability benchmarks globally with only the top ranked companies in terms of Corporate Sustainability within each industry featured in the index.

Researchers have developed a sustainable biomedical device, consisting of by-products from the food industry, for use in regenerative medicine.

Scientists in the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country’s NanoBioCel and Biomat groups have developed a novel biomedical device comprised of soy protein and chitin, by-products from the food industry which are typically discarded in industrial processes.

AstraZeneca has launched an ambitious $1billion programme to reduce its climate impact to zero - and it will plant an AZ Forest with 50 million trees.

The company, which is building its global headquarters and R&D centre in Cambridge, aims for zero emissions from its own operations by 2025 and says it will ensure its entire value chain is carbon negative by 2030.

CVS Health has launched its 13th annual corporate social responsibility (CSR) report and unveiled Transform Health 2030, the company’s new CSR roadmap for the next decade. The report lays the groundwork for how the company will transform health in four priority areas: Healthy People, Healthy Business, Healthy Community and Healthy Planet. It outlines the ways CVS Health is simplifying the health care system, supporting the personal and professional development of colleagues, investing in community health at the local level and setting bold goals to reduce environmental impact.

In an in-depth review of the market and having evaluated the collective developments from this year’s Pharmapack event, Gregor Anderson – MD of Pharmacentric Solutions – offers a positive appraisal of pharma’s drive towards sustainability.

“I am really encouraged by the massive strides we have made this year. As an industry, we are no longer paying lip service to sustainability and wherein once there might have just been a single dedicated employee, there are now entire teams looking at improving methods and exploring life-cycle impact” commented Anderson.

One of the big differences identified is the increased sharing across the industry and how actively involved the entire supply chain is in the discussion. Both the suppliers of packaging and devices are working more closely with big pharma and this is leading to accelerated development.

According to Kent Iverson, a biotech consultant based in the San Francisco area, it might be time for the industry to “take a step back and look critically at the pros and cons of single use as opposed to reusable bioprocessing technologies. I think the bioprocessing industry as a whole embraces single use without acknowledgement of its shortcomings.”

Iverson believes that single-use manufacturing may be more expensive than reusable operations when capital costs are appropriately amortized. Single-use bioreactor technology is not as scalable as stainless-steel bioreactor technology, nor is it amenable to fully automated operations. Disposable components require a greater amount of transport into and out of production areas, as well as manual set up and take down, and this creates a higher floor of labor resource and facility space needed per unit of production. Single-use technologies are also limited in terms of scale and capacity of clarification steps, whereas the limitations for reusable technologies such as centrifugation are cost, space, and efficiency.

Encompassing broad items as simple as bandages all the way through to ultra-high-tech pacemakers, the U.S. medical device market is the largest in the world. Forbes called it a “disruptive” market of $410 billion through 2023. Today, “disruptive” is an appropriate word. 

More than a decade ago, the medical device manufacturing industry saw an increasing emphasis on design and simplicity, driven by software and technologies. And innovation contributed to a shift in power from the pharmaceutical to the medical device industry. These days, there is still a high demand for technological, intuitive devices — with a faster time-to-market than ever before. Hospitals, medical facilities, and other markets are pressuring medical device manufacturers to be more secure, innovative, cost-effective, and efficient.

A recent study from McMaster University made headlines due to its findings that the pharma industry is a significant contributor to global warming and even eclipses the automotive industry in terms of carbon emissions.
With a deadline of 2022, Merck is targeting four aspects of packaging to reduce the amount of packaging it uses; achieve zero deforestation; improve plastic sustainability and maximise recycling.
Considering the company ships 30,000 packages each day, not to mention the complexity of the pharma supply chain, it’s an almost unfathomable task, but one that is necessary in an era in which environmental concerns are becoming more widespread. 

Envirotainer, the global market leader in secure cold chain solutions for air transportation of pharmaceuticals and Air France KLM Martinair Cargo (AFKLMP Cargo), the leading airline in pharmaceutical logistics, today announced their collaboration on Sustainability.

Envirotainer and Air France KLM Martinair Cargo each have a strong focus on sustainability and are pursuing multiple initiatives with a view to achieving more sustainable operations. Being long-term close partners, both organisations sought to strengthen the initiatives by collaboration.

Air France KLM Martinair Cargo has approved the newly introduced Envirotainer Releye® container and is in the process of implementing it in its booking system as part of its product portfolio. The Releye provides outstanding environmental performance, delivering up to 90% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to available passive solutions, based on life-cycle analysis.

TCS is working with clients across retail, financial services, pharma, manufacturing, automobile, consumer goods as well as group companies to offer these IoT-based solutions to track emissions and energy consumption, said Regu Ayyaswamy, global head, IoT and digital engineering, TCS.

“There is a lot of corporate board-level focus on sustainability. So, people are really looking at how they can grow their business sustainably. Three years back, everybody was working with minimum viable products but now customers have gone on scale,” he said.

A leading North American pharmacy retailer has deployed TCS Clever Energy to reduce emissions by 26% across thousands of its stores.

The pandemic has required a rethink of how we do business: and CPhI Festival of Pharma is encouraging companies to prioritize sustainability efforts moving forward.
Momentum towards more sustainable solutions has been building over the last few years – think Greta Thunberg, climate strikes, David Attenborough, COP21 – and thus increasing scrutiny in the area.

And while the coronavirus pandemic may have grabbed the world’s attention in 2020, organizations like CPhI champion the opportunity to use the shake-up as a chance to reset the industry’s approach to the environment. For the pharma and biopharma industry, it’s a wide-reaching remit: covering everything from the carbon footprint of the supply chain to waste management.

“Challenging times call for great innovation,”​ notes CPhI. “Opportunities to accelerate market growth are hand-in-hand with social and environmental sustainability. ​Leading operations efficiency is one of the ways in which businesses can be cost-effective and contribute to a faster market recovery whilst building consumer loyalty.​

“One of the biggest challenges a company faces when embracing sustainability is finding the right information and resources. Look out for consumer trends and market updates at CPhI.”

The world was already waking up to the economic as well as environmental need for the shift from a linear to a circular approach for a sustainable future. Most investors, governments and healthcare providers have aligned on the need to set greenhouse gas reduction targets and are scrutinizing their indirect carbon emissions related to the goods and services they procure and the companies they invest in.

Such shifting market demands are seeing healthcare systems take a holistic view of the entire care pathway: the environmental impact of the medicine itself, use of power and resources by the organization and its supply chain, and the impacts of patients with poorly managed chronic disease.

 Stericycle Environmental Solutions, a leading provider of environmental and regulated waste management solutions, today announced it has been named a 2019 Sustainability, Environmental Achievement & Leadership (SEAL) Award winner for its impactful drug take back initiatives that have collected and destroyed more than 2.89 million pounds of pharmaceuticals. Earning recognition in the Environmental Initiative category, Stericycle's program ensures unused or expired drugs are properly disposed to prevent them from making their way back into soil, waterways and other parts of our ecosystem.

Did you know that biopharmaceutical manufacturers must begin setting up the manufacturing supply chain for a medicine years before that medicine is even approved for use by patients? That’s a fact that is frequently overlooked by policymakers who are proposing drastic, mandated changes to pharmaceutical supply chains. Changes made to any supply chain require careful consideration and planning, as well as substantial engagement with FDA to obtain regulatory review and approval.

Building a new biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility can take 5 to 10 years, on average, before it is operational and can cost as much as $2 billion.

There will always be challenges for the pharmaceutical industry where sustainability is concerned, but it needn’t be a bitter pill to swallow.

From complex medication requiring specific packaging to tight production schedules, the industry faces stubborn obstacles in ensuring that it improves the wellbeing and health of humans while not harming the planet.

There are plenty of opportunities for improvement, however, be it through collaborating with medical device manufacturers to create more simple and convenient products, to using unique serial numbers to track pharmaceutical products throughout a fully transparent supply chain.

So, what are individual pharmaceutical companies doing to leverage sustainability? Acre has highlighted six leaders in this area. All have recently been recognised by the research firm Corporate Knights as among the world’s 100 most sustainable companies, out of more than 7,000 assessed.

The R&D efforts of Europe’s pharma packaging companies when it comes to drug dispensing systems are focused on several ‘pain points’, among them an ageing population, child safety considerations, increasing compliance, product security and sustainability. Victoria Hattersley talks to some industry representatives to find out more about the unique challenges involved in dispensing medications and the different ways their organizations are approaching these.

Another drugmaker from Europe, where governments are concerned about the effects of climate change, has achieved an aggressive goal to walk more softly on the earth. Vetter says from this point forward, all of its nine German sites will be powered by CO2 neutral energy from certified renewable energy sources. The Ravensburg, Germany-based CDMO, which says sustainability is a pillar of its corporate credo, has four manufacturing sites in Germany, as well as a site for visual inspection and logistics and four administrative facilities.