Supply chain & logistics
Comparing emissions between companies is difficult
Dr Amy Booth, a medical doctor now undertaking a PhD at the University of Oxford on the environmental impact of health systems, has looked at the company reports of the 20 biggest (by prescription revenue) pharmaceutical companies to find out the extent to which the industry has engaged in emissions reduction. In a recently published conference paper, Booth and her coauthors found that 19 of the 20 companies had made commitments to reduce carbon emissions, with half committing to carbon neutrality and 40% to net zero emissions by a range of target years. Ninety percent had committed to improving reporting and reducing emissions across their supply chain.
While this is promising, Booth notes that it is difficult to compare what companies are doing: “Pharmaceutical companies have different baseline emissions, different baseline reporting years, run different operations, have different product scopes, and different employee sizes. This all affects their emissions and makes comparing their commitments to reduce these emissions difficult. In addition, there are different ways companies can make commitments to reduce their emissions. Some make pledges to carbon neutrality, some to net zero, or some to reducing their emissions by a certain percentage by a certain year.” Some of the commitments are vague, she adds, lacking clarity about whether they refer to emissions only in scope 1 and 2, or across scopes 1, 2 and 3. Where companies have reported emissions, says Booth, most of the 20 companies had succeeded in reducing scope 1 emissions, and all had reduced scope 2 from their respective baseline years of reporting.
Positive initiatives cited by Booth include the implementation of renewable energy sources, such as solar panels or wind farms. Many companies said that they were planning to “switch to more energy- efficient equipment, optimise manufacturing processes through green chemistry principles and switching their vehicles from petrol or diesel to hybrid or electric”.
GSK, for example, is undertaking a series of initiatives to meet its target of achieving net zero by 2030. At its large manufacturing facility in Irvine, Scotland, it intends to install two new wind turbines (8 MW) and a 56-acre, 20 MW solar farm. It is also redesigning its rescue metered dose asthma inhalers to use a lower greenhouse gas propellant that has
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the potential, the company says, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its inhalers by 90%. Other companies are beginning to move from batch manufacturing – where materials are made in large bundles, and are sometimes shipped to different locations between steps – to continuous manufacturing, a more efficient process in which drugs are made in a single location in an uninterrupted flow. Those who have adopted continuous manufacturing for part of their drug production include Eli Lilly, Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer. Three years ago, Sanofi opened a continuous manufacturing plant in Massachusetts that emits 80% less carbon dioxide than its first- generation facility. It also reduces water and chemical usage by 91% and 94%, respectively.
Supply chain diversity poses a challenge While companies are taking positive steps to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions, tackling scope 3 emissions is a tougher challenge. “The supply chain for any company is quite diverse,” says Booth, “because you’re not just looking at raw material suppliers or waste management companies, you’re also looking at IT and lawyers and marketing and communications companies.” Finding a standardised method for measuring and reporting emissions from such a diverse supply base is far from straightforward.
Some pharma companies have begun engaging with their supply chain, says Booth, through measures such as “implementing sustainability criteria into their vendor selection processes” and “committing to a programme where they assist suppliers to purchase more renewable energy”.
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