Sustainable Procurement & CSR News - Pharmaceutical Industry

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.

Pharmaceutical manufacturer Romaco Siebler and foil specialist Huhtamaki are about to launch a range of recyclable unit dose packaging for solid pharmaceutical products, made from recyclable polyolefin laminate. With over 90% of the components used to make the packaging made of either polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP), more than 70% of the final product can be recycled.

GlaxoSmithKline and Samsung Biologics have teamed up to give GSK additional capacity to manufacture and supply its biopharmaceutical therapies.

Thermal packaging solutions provider Packaging Technology Group (PTG) has introduced a sustainable dual temperature pharmaceutical shipper.

The thermal solution enables transport of medications and therapies with different temperature profiles together in the same container.

Usually, some medications would require to be shipped frozen and a few other need to be refrigerated.

With the dual temp shipper, transport of complex immunotherapies becomes easy. These treatments are effective in combating certain cancers and other diseases.

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.

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.

Environmental sustainability is one of the most important priorities for the healthcare industry and for medical plastics and device manufacturers. The challenge ahead demands that supply chain partners focus on sustainability within their own organisations and across their extended supply chains.

Healthcare sustainability initiatives are gaining momentum. The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council’s (HPRC) membership has grown to include some of the industry’s largest device makers. Health Care Without Harm is working globally to promote sustainable procurement practices, green hospitals and healthcare waste reduction, and through its “For a greener NHS” campaign, the U.K. National Health Service is tackling climate change on multiple fronts - from reducing hospital emissions to investing in telemedicine.

The pharmaceutical industry, like many other areas of life, relies on clean water. To make different drugs safe to ingest, chemists need to use ultra-pure water in the production process. Industry standards like the European Pharmacopoeia even set regulations for water purity in pharmaceuticals.

In 2020, the goal of reducing supply chain efficiencies has become especially true for the healthcare industry, as hospitals and healthcare systems work to reduce the billions of dollars spent on unnecessary supply chain operations every year. Currently, healthcare costs more in the United States than almost any other country. Nearly a third of these costs are attributed to supply chain operations, and that number is only expected to grow in the coming years.

What causes such high costs every year? One of the root problems is incidents in the transportation stage of the supply chain process. These events can range from temperature excursions to improper handling: anything that ultimately results in unusable, wasted product. This damage can then lead to a variety of consequences and incurred costs.

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. 

The path to opioid addiction often starts with the dealer in our own homes: the medicine cabinet. But disposing of unused or expired prescription drugs by flushing them down the toilet trades one health risk for another by polluting water.

It’s time to tackle both issues with a statewide drug takeback program funded by pharmaceutical companies, members of a coalition said Thursday as they announced the Illinois Drug Take-back Act.

State Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz (17th District) introduced the measure with support from public health and safety officials as well as environmental organizations.

Two years into its work, a voluntary, industry-led effort to reduce pollution from antibiotic manufacturing facilities is drawing mixed reviews from outside analysts. A new report from a pharmaceutical industry group says it is making substantial progress toward curbing leaks of antibiotic compounds into the environment. But critics say the report highlights the need for governments to enact binding rules.

Studies have found that many antibiotic manufacturing facilities release the compounds they are making into the environment, often via wastewater, contributing to the deadly problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). (Overuse and improper disposal of drugs also contribute to AMR.) In 2017, after global leaders committed to tackling AMR, more than 100 drug companies and industry associations formed a group—the AMR Industry Alliance—in part to police manufacturing discharges. Alliance members account for roughly one-third of the world’s antibiotic sales.

Until recently, innovation lay dormant in the quality-driven cannabis industry. However, an evolving regulatory environment, coupled with tech-driven research, has bred a new era of cannabinoid solutions.

One brand leading the API (active pharmaceutical ingredients) aspect of the space is Aureus Santa Marta, a brand of Avicanna Inc AVCNF (TSX: AVCN) which combines its industrial, ethically-driven and sustainable cannabis cultivation strategies with research and world-class quality standards, to disseminate cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals, phytotherapeutics, derma-cosmetics, and purified extracts.

The economic shutdown under the Covid-19 pandemic has had two monumental impacts on our environment. It has improved our air and water quality dramatically, and slashed our material consumption, water usage and waste production.

Data from the CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board) and the UPPCB (Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board) shows that the Ganga’s water along its most polluted stretch in Uttar Pradesh is carrying more dissolved oxygen and less nitrates. These conditions are conducive to survival of aquatic life. Its biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) has correspondingly fallen, along with the concentration of total coliform, which is a testament to improved water quality. Similar positive developments have been reported for the Yamuna.

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.

An advisory from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity, the Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns of a coordinated attack against the healthcare industry and other essential services.

“These organizations’ global reach and international supply chains increase exposure to malicious cyber actors,” reads the advisory. “Actors view supply chains as a weak link that they can exploit to obtain access to better-protected targets. Many supply chain elements have also been affected by the shift to remote working and the new vulnerabilities that have resulted.”

Swiss company has developed a tech-enabled shipping container that not only predicts and controls risk but reduces CO2 emissions by half.

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.

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.

UK packaging company DS Smith has developed an eco-friendly alternative to plastic packaging for anti-allergy kits.

The packaging has been designed for a global pharmaceutical company, which specialises in allergy treatments.

The pharma company was looking for a sustainable alternative for the existing plastic packaging of the kits, which are delivered by post.