CLINICAL OPERATIONS & OUTSOURCING
chair of eco-entrepreneurship at McMaster University, who has been highly critical of pharma’s approach towards its carbon impact. “Who cares about carbon footprint when you’re doing so much for humanity, right?” Belkhir and co-author Ahmed Elmiligi published a 2019 comparative analysis of the pharma industry’s largest players in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Contrary to the industry’s own assessment
that it is a ‘medium-impact sector’, the study – which assessed emissions reported by large pharma companies in 2015 – found the industry emitted more, and was more carbon-intensive, than the automotive industry. pecifically, the .55 tonnes of equivalent that the sector emitted per million dollars of revenue was found to be 55% greater than the emissions of the automotive sector. The report also found wild variability in the carbon performance of comparable pharma companies li illys carbon intensity was five times greater than that of Roche, for example – and a lack of transparency on the details of companies’ environmental performance. r main hypothesis is that the pharma
indstry is so profitable that it can afford to be extremely wasteful in its manufacturing processes and hence it has little economic incentive to optimise those high-footprint processes,” says Belkhir. EFPIA’s Reid questions the “assumptions
made” in the 2019 study, noting that some of her organisation’s member companies felt that drawing a line between the carbon intensity of pharma and other industries was akin to “comparing apples to bananas”. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that
tracing carbon intensity among pharma firms is a challenging endeavour, “given they have so many product types, modalities, locations, the size of their lots, their drug pricing models. This all impacts quite a bit on that.” Reid also notes that the industry’s hands are sometimes tied by regulations – the ecologically wasteful practice of including paper leaflets with every medicine, for example, is mandated – and what is best for proper drug manufacturing and distribution isn’t always what’s best for the environment. “We need certain heating, certain
insulation and air conditioning as part of 12 | Outsourcing In Clinical Trials
the manufacturing,” she says. “This increases emissions and is something
we need to work on. As we’ve seen recently with vaccines and cold storage, we’re needing more and more cold storage, and again this increases emissions.”
Sustainability in a complex global supply chain Tracking biopharma’s environmental footprint involves digging through layers of complexity. The breadth of the potential impact beyond simple carbon emissions is huge, from the aforementioned packaging waste to inefficiencies in transport and logistics, to pharmaceutical contamination of water supplies and drug disposal issues. All these challenges and more are painted
across a canvas as wide as the industry’s international supply chain. The globalisation of the pharma supply chain has without doubt saved countless lives as well as dollars, but it has also compounded the challenge of not only ensuring drug safety, but also mitigating its environmental impact around the world. “The trouble with pharma is that it has
so many sub-sectors,” says ESG adviser Myrto Kontaxi, who joined the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable as a partner in 2016. “No pharma is exactly the same as another and their supply chains may differ. “The pandemic emphasised that global
supply chains may have to be rethought in a different way. t yo do find very resilient and resourceful people who are in charge of supply chains. And they’ve been challenged immensely over the past two years in every sector, and specifically the pharma sector. While the McMaster study might have cast
a pessimistic light on the pharma supply chain and its environmental performance, it’s also true that a great deal of water has passed under the corporate bridge since 2015, the year from which that assessment scraped its data. Emissions monitoring, and environmental stewardship more broadly, is at the core of the business agenda in 2021, pharma included. “It’s being baked into standards, it’s being
baked into regulations, it’s being baked into stock exchange listing requirements, [and] it’s being baked into tender offer structures and bank loan requests now,” says Schoichet.
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