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Green Your Lab

S&P Global interviewed Green Your Lab for an article for their website: You can read the article here. 


What are some of the biggest challenges facing the biopharma industry in reducing the carbon footprint in drug manufacturing?     
It is a matter of priorities. Like most industries, it must balance running day-to-day operations and speed to market, with innovating for sustainability. It is not to say that the biopharma industry does not have significant hurdles to overcome. The pharmaceutical industry needs to produce high quality medication to specification and the challenges associated leads to a risk-averse mind-set. The huge carbon footprint starts in the drug discovery and drug development phase. The lab procedures are complex, unforgiving, and both time and resource consuming. With their dozens of safety cabinets, ultra-low temperature freezers, fume hoods and various equipment, Bio labs can use up to 10x the energy of an office building. Solvent usage is abhorrent, water wastage is troubling and single-use plastic is the norm. It is also understandable that, given the low success rates of clinical trials, pharma companies do not want to invest time and effort early in the developmental phase to address synthesis sustainability before they confirm a drug can go to market. But once the drug has left the laboratory, it is difficult to go back and make those changes and the drug continues to the manufacturing phase. All manufacturing plants produce significant emissions, but compared to Chemical plants, pharmaceutical manufacturers need to have extra measures in place to make these high quality biological molecules. Their buildings often need to be carefully controlled for temperature and humidity. The raw materials and finished products may need cold storage and have short shelf-lives. Drug production is often done in smaller batch sizes, so they do not have the same scaled benefits. Biological molecules are often sensitive to heat and shear; therefore, they require more complex and energy intensive methods of homogenisation and purification. Cleaning and sanitization requirements are to the highest standard, which is usually the most energy intensive. Good Manufacturing Practices often means a constant stream of disposables.

In addition, drug approvals not only cover a drug’s efficacy and safety, it also covers the production process. So, even if a company develops a new more-sustainable process, there is a lot of red tape they have to endure to make post-approval changes.

Furthermore, many major pharmaceutical companies have outsourced their manufacturing. Outsourced manufacturing not only decreases the original company’s control on the production process, but decreases their incentive to innovate because any sustainability savings benefit the contractors.

Once a drug patent expires, generics or biosimilars companies take over. These companies prioritise being first to file a generic product because it gives them a window of exclusivity in many markets. So, they typically follow the instructions of the original patent. Even if the original manufacturer has made changes to make their process more sustainable, the generic companies may not know about them or those new processes are protected under new patents. Once a generics company has gotten regulatory approval, they rarely take the time to put in the R&D to make the process more sustainable.  

What are the most common solutions you have seen among biopharma companies seeking to reach lower or net-zero emissions goals?       
The most common solutions seen in biopharma companies are switching to renewable energy, carbon off-setting, optimizing transport and switching the electric vehicles, innovating new and existing products to decrease production and end user emissions, and working with suppliers to decrease raw material footprint.      


What policies would help incentivize biotech and pharmaceutical companies to lower emissions?       
We need governments to look at sustainability the same way they look at business financials. The first step is for governments to make sustainability reporting mandatory. Similar to financial reports, sustainability reports need to be in an industry-standardized format that can be compared and contextualised against their peers, and possibly, against other industries.

When it comes to incentives and punishments, Governments need extremely well thought-out plans to ensure there are not any gaps, such as accidentally punishing those who have already worked hard on improving sustainability, which can result from some carbon credit schemes, or inadvertently incentivising negative actions.

For incentives, removing red-tape and expediting regulatory reviews when companies propose greener processes will help. Then offering tax credits for sharing those advancements to generic companies once the patent expires would be a great incentive. On the punishment front, environmental pollution should be more strictly regulated. Simple initiatives, such as the European Water Framework Directive, just do not have enough bite to curb pharmaceutical pollution. There needs to be strict legislation. It is not that Big Pharma will be deterred by simple fines, but not being allowed to launch a new product or the public relations nightmare caused by not following the letter law may actually be much more effective. In countries with government-run health care systems, they should use their purchasing power to incentivise. As one of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest customers, they have the ability to force them to change.

Pharma Technology Focus Magazine interviewed Green Your Lab for their Jan 2021 issue: You can read the article here. 


How big a polluter is the pharma industry? What about the healthcare ecosystem as a whole?     
It is estimated that the healthcare ecosystem of OECD countries plus China and India emitted more than 1600 MMt-CO2e (Million Metric tons of CO2 equivalent) in 2014 [published in 2019 by IOP and Healthcare without harm on slightly different set of major countries]. This contributed to between 3-8% of a country’s total carbon footprint. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) reported their 2019 emissions to be 25 MMt-CO2e (Million Metric tons of CO2 equivalent), which is more than the emissions from the entire country of Croatia. This is already down from the 32 MMt-CO2e reported in 2012, after extensive efforts by the NHS to curb their carbon footprint.   

Pharmaceuticals are the largest contributor of the NHS’s greenhouse case emissions, accounting for 16-20% of their total carbon footprint. The contributions of the pharmaceutical industry are much less transparent. It was not until 2019 that the first assessment of the global carbon footprint of the pharmaceutical sector of 2012 and 2015 was attempted using non-publicly available data. Even then, the study could only find data for 25 companies for 2015 and 15 companies for 2012. They estimated that the pharmaceutical sector’s emission in 2015 to be 52 MMt-CO2e which is 13% higher than the 46.4 MMt-CO2e emitted by the global automotive sector in that same year, despite the pharmaceutical industry being 28% smaller (Belkhir and Elmeligi, 2019).  

What makes healthcare such a big polluter?     
There are many reasons why healthcare is such a big polluter. For example, hospitals are the second-most energy-intensive commercial building type. They are large, open 24/7, with sophisticated heating, cooling and ventilation systems. Around the clock, they carry out energy-intensive activities such as sterilization, refrigeration, laundry and food service.     

Healthcare uses a wide range of single-use disposables to decrease potential for infection and errors and to increase convenience in an already stressful environment. Disposable materials can amount to 13 kg of waste per patient bed per day or approximately 5 million tons of waste each year (PGH). One very common example are disposable custom packs, a set of products pre-packaged for a specific procedure to reduce time and error. Once a disposable custom pack is opened, every item is discarded, even if not used.  The disposable cotton towels in these packs are far from sustainable, requiring significant amounts of water, land, fertilizer, and labour to produce.     

Of all the studies done in the carbon footprint of health systems, one of the largest, if not the largest, contributors to healthcare’s emissions are pharmaceuticals. In general, the pharmaceutical industry is risk-averse and exclusively focuses on producing high quality medication to specification. The huge carbon footprint starts in the drug discovery and drug development phase. Bio labs can use up to 10x the energy of an office building. A bio-safety cabinet and a -20 °C freezer each use as much as half a homes’ worth of energy, an ultra-low temperature freezer the energy of an entire home, a fume hood 3.5 home’s worth, and an autoclave up to 4 home’s worth. When you multiply those with the fact most labs have multiples of these pieces of equipment, that there are multiple labs in each building, and multiple buildings at an R&D facility, you very quickly add up to a city’s worth of energy.     

In biotechnology, the lab procedures are complex, unforgiving, and both time and resource consuming. These procedures are taught from one generation to the next. Researchers are often too risk-averse, time pressed or too lazy to make changes, or simply did not even think that they could make a change to the procedures. A good example are ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers. ULT freezers used to be set at -70C for storage of biological molecules. A new refrigerant came on the market which allowed these freezers to go to -80°C. And now, -80°C has become the industry standard without any conclusive scientific basis. Changing these freezers back to a -70°C set point is a very contentious issue for researchers.     
 
Is the industry in breach of major international agreements or of some nation's domestic green policies?     
There are a number of international environmental standards, such as ASTM, ISO and BIS. There have been some offenses that have drawn media attention. For example, a few years back, ciprofloxacin, a broad spectrum antibiotic, was found in the waterways Patancheru, India at a rate of release of 44kg/day, which is equivalent to Sweden’s consumption for 5 days. There were similar reports in other Asian countries such as China, Korea, Taiwan and Pakistan. Even some US and European pharma sites were called out for their high levels of active pharmaceutical ingredients.     

However, the majority of pharmaceutical pollution is invisible and, either not measured, or not well documented by pharmaceutical companies. It is only recently that we have had the affordable technology to start testing environmental samples and tracking down pharmaceutical polluters. Clearly, there needs to be wider monitoring of pharmaceutical pollution worldwide.   

In recent years, do you think there has been an interest from the healthcare industry to be more green and sustainable? What is driving the industry's green commitments and initiatives around being carbon zero or neutral?    
In recent years, there has been increasing interest from the healthcare industry to be more green and sustainable. Significant pressure is coming from all angles. Some of this interest is because sustainability is the current zeitgeist and internal and public pressure are mounting. Also, governmental healthcare agencies, such as the NHS, know that environmental pollution is closely tied with human health. As the pharmaceutical industry’s largest customers, they have the ability to force them to change.     

Much interest is also driven by current and potential regulatory changes. Many countries are pledging carbon neutrality. If they haven’t yet, it is only a matter of time that governments will start implementing carbon taxes, which will hit a company’s bottom line. It is better for a company to act early and become publicly known as a sustainability leader, than it is to be considered a laggard. Investors are also starting to understand that environmentally unsustainable businesses are financially unsustainable and will introduce unwanted risks to their portfolios.   

Is this interest in sustainability widely spread across the industry or concentrated with a few companies or organisations? Are there any stand out examples of companies or organisations to you with regard to their eco-friendly commitments?     
The interest in sustainability, especially with regards to carbon emissions, is widely spread across the industry. Almost all major and minor pharmaceutical companies have some sort of sustainability plan.     

A couple notable examples: 

Roche, is a company that doesn’t market their sustainability efforts as loudly as its competitors. They have a very modest goal of reaching carbon neutrality in 2050. But for 10 consecutive years (2008-2018), Roche was ranked the most sustainable company on the Dow Jones Sustainability indices (they were ranked 2nd in 2019), their carbon footprint intensity (CO2/$) is notably one of the lowest in the pharmaceutical industry, and they are ahead of schedule on reaching the targets set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, needed to limit world temperature rise below 1.5°C. They have worked hard internally to analyse and innovate on all their products, research pipelines and supply chains to find ways they can reduce their carbon footprint. The transparency of their environmental reporting is also above average. Roche has also demonstrated some of the highest increased revenue growth in the sector, showing that companies do not need to sacrifice financial performance for sustainability.     

AstraZeneca, who is on track to reach IPCC targets and is on the Carbon Disclosure Project’s A-list, has widely announced the very bold goal of going Carbon Neutral by 2025 and even Carbon Negative by 2030. Their efforts and investments to decarbonise every part of their value chain is a model for the industry. One of AstraZeneca’s most commendable actions is their Green Lab initiative. Most pharmaceutical companies are shy to make changes in their drug discovery and drug development labs (for the many reasons discussed above). AstraZeneca has decided to leave no-stone unturned and has bravely started to make changes to their laboratory practices in the name of sustainability. It is not that the contribution of laboratories is large when compared to the emissions of manufacturing, but the fact that AstraZeneca took on the Green Lab challenge, proves dedication.    

Large companies coming forward to publicly announce their carbon neutral plans brings sustainability to the forefront of business news and encourages it to become an industry standard. Their actions have then influenced other similar companies and their suppliers to follow in step. Today, it is considered unacceptable for a pharmaceutical company not to have any sustainability plans. However, the number of pharmaceutical companies that can be recognised for their sustainability efforts can be counted on your fingers.     

Pair that with large customers, such as the NHS, wanting to decrease their carbon footprint to zero, including contributions from the pharmaceuticals they use, gives every pharmaceutical company the push it needs to make sustainability their priority.   

Do you think the initiatives being announced by the industry go far enough to make up for the damage to the environment done by the industry in the past?    
“Carbon-neutral”, by definition, is not sufficient to reverse past damage. It only maintains the status quo once neutrality is achieved, and that is providing they can stay neutral.     

In addition, most pharmaceutical companies will need to use carbon offsets to reach their sustainability pledges. This means these companies will still have a lot of room to keep decarbonising even after they have “reached” their goals.      

There are some companies ahead of the pack. AstraZeneca has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 by implementing carbon sequestration technologies and partnering with reforestation organisations. That is an excellent first step to making up for past damage, but it is a very small step for the industry, and a lot more work still needs to be done.    

What is stopping the healthcare industry being bolder in its commitments?    
Realistically, it will be decades before every pharmaceutical company commits to carbon sequestration. And of course, it is better to work hard at minimising one’s carbon footprint internally. However, it is always possible for pharma companies to purchase carbon offsets to reach their neutrality goals faster, or to become carbon negative. The reason that they do not do it immediately today, is that it costs money.     

Pharma companies are for-profit companies who need to continue to maximise shareholder return. They need sustainability to make “good businesses sense” for them before they act. So in reality, I believe pharma companies do not make bolder commitments that commit to reversing past damage, because carbon neutrality is “enough” – Enough to get regulators off their back, enough to appease their customers, enough to avoid public backlash.   

What types of initiatives or commitments would you like to see from the pharma industry to make them even more eco-friendly? How can they make better use of innovative technology to drive more eco-friendly healthcare?     
Sustainability needs to be a top management level initiative and be proactively incorporated into a company’s vision, mission, goals, and most importantly, culture. Executive compensation should be tied to reaching sustainability goals the same way they are tied to business outcomes.     

One of the most important things pharmaceutical companies need to do on their sustainability journey is to provide thorough and transparent environmental reporting. They should be measuring and publicly reporting all of their emissions, CO2 and otherwise, for each of their business lines separately and consistently every single year. Setbacks should also be shared.     

Pharma companies should already embrace green chemistry principles and technologies early in their drug discovery and development phases and consider LCA before deciding on the final production process. During process design and scale-up, they should analyse each step carefully, from the shelf-life of their raw materials, to their cleaning and sanitization procedures, to understand where they can reduce waste, energy and water prior to solidifying manufacturing plans.     

As mentioned before, due to low clinical success rates, pharma companies may not feel it is expedient to dedicate resources to identify sustainable pathways early, but new and upcoming technologies can help. For example, AI aided drug screening, and soon, in-silico clinical testing brings speed and savings. It can help identify a smaller subset of drugs to test, allowing time and resources to be dedicated to sustainability.     

Pharmaceutical companies also need to think more about their end users and find ways to integrate their products into a circular economy. They need to plan for how an end user stores the drugs before use, recycles their packaging and disposes of expired drugs sustainably.     

Companies should share their sustainability technology advancements and best practices with the wider industry freely and not lock the knowledge up in patents or trade secrets.     

Lastly, pharma companies need to think of sustainability beyond their carbon footprint; they need to track air and water pollution and human rights and ensure their business forwards all relevant SDGs.    

What can governments and international organisations do to encourage the industry to do better? 
Since pharma companies spread their operations multi-nationally, it would be ideal for industry laws, guidelines, incentives and punishments to be implemented at a global level which then pushes national and local legislators to act accordingly.     

Governments should also encourage and provide budgets for their health systems to go carbon neutral, similar to the NHS. Considering the environmental impact of healthcare on a country’s carbon footprint, to reach their national sustainability goals, countries cannot ignore the sector. As the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest customer, once health authorities make sustainability their priority, it will be evidently clear that pharma companies will need to as well. 

The largest coal-fired power plant in the western U.S., Navajo Generating Station plant, closed in Nov 2019 and striking demolition videos are populating the internet, making it a hot topic of discussion. The Native American tribes said the facility had been a symbol for their mistreatment and are planning to replace the coal plant with solar energy generation. 

It’s the end of an era – and the start of a hopeful new one. 

In the West, coal powered our industrial revolution and it’s cheap condensed energy enabled factories, transportation and electricity to accelerate. The coal mining industry wielded significant political power and provided ample jobs to boost the economy. But, it came at a cost – to our environment. 

Around the world, the sentiments for coal are shifting. America and Europe’s coal consumption has fallen 34% since 2009. In the UK, the last coal fired power plants are expected to close by 2022. In the US, Joe Biden has already assembled his climate fighting team pre-inauguration and the US is expected to re-join the Paris Agreement. American coal mining companies, even with favourable deregulation and political support, are in constant battles to avoid bankruptcy. China, along with most countries, has adopted a Net Zero Carbon Emissions target. In Financial markets, clean energy firms are all the rage, and Tesla just joined the S&P 500. 

Alternative, more sustainable energy sources, such as wind, solar and natural gas are fierce competitors with green tax credits, subsidies, rebates helping renewables scale-up. Solar farms and wind energy are now the cheapest energy sources for 2/3 of the world's population (Bloomberg MEF).   

But coal still accounts for 27% of raw energy usage and 39% of annual emissions of CO2 for fossil fuels. How? 

Coal’s consumption in Asia, accounts for 77% of world usage and in the last decade has grown by 25%. China and India are the greatest consumers and coal dominates in fast growing societies like Indonesia and Vietnam. 

If we want to limit global temperature rise to under 2°C above pre-industrial levels, we need to act now. 

New coal powered plants are still being built and existing plants still have many years of life left. This needs to stop. Similar to the Philippines, a moratorium needs to be put on building new plants. 

However, this is easier said than done. The industry is a complex web of companies, mining firms, power stations, equipment providers, banks and politicians – often all state controlled. For example, China’s state lenders have up to $1 Trillion USD at stake. Coal politics is complicated because as it weaves together employment, tax revenue, debt and exports. Also, many Asian energy markets are locked into legacy long term contracts and the coal industry is full of opaque subsidies and price caps, which prevents renewables from competing fairly. The whole system needs to be revamped.

Asian countries are some of the most susceptible to climate change. So, Asian countries have the most gain by getting rid of coal. However, they can’t let the short term political and economic costs discourage them. Asian countries are in dire need of financial aid, the newest renewable and smart grid technologies, retraining of coal workers, and restructuring their incentive systems. And developed countries need to fulfil their promises to help.   

 
Published: 20/12/2020  

Amazon embarking on a climate friendly mission is the right move. They’re not only pledging to be “net zero carbon” by 2040, they are donating money to reforestation campaigns, funding companies in the sustainability space, and moving to electric vehicles. Their actions have then influenced other similar companies and their suppliers to follow in step. 


Can Amazon achieve this through simply purchasing carbon offsets? If so, is it still a commendable target?
Amazon can achieve their pledge to be "net zero carbon" by 2040 through purchasing carbon offsets, but there is a movement internally in the company to analyze and innovate on all their businesses and supply chains to find ways they can reduce their carbon footprint. This can result in a large impact. 

It is likely that they will need to purchase at least some carbon offsets to reach their goal. However, it is still commendable because 1. It brings sustainability to the forefront of their business mentality and as an industry standard, and 2. It brings revenue to the renewable  energy companies that in turn will be invested into improving and expanding their technologies. It is only when sustainable products have customers that they can grow and invest. 


Is Amazon's Climate Change Friendly label standards legitimate or greenwashing?
The idea of helping consumers easily locate sustainable products with their Amazon's Climate Pledge Friendly program is excellent. Amazon is a huge shopping platform and it can be difficult for consumers to find products that suit their lifestyle. It gives a boost to sales of Green products, which in turn helps forward the movement. Similar to above, more sales equals market validation and more money that can be invested into making greener products. 

However, there’s more than what meets the eye. Many products listed in Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program are not necessarily sustainable. Many sustainability terms don’t have legal definitions and the 3rd-party certification requirements can be quite relaxed, self-reported and subjective. Unfortunately, most products use these terms as a form of greenwashing. For example, the bar for something to be “Natural” or “renewable” is extremely low and if consumers could see the heavy chemical processes behind the production of their “Natural” or “renewable” products, they would be absolutely shocked. 

In addition, when companies apply for 3rd-party certification processes, many important factors are missed. For example, most of a cleaning product’s environmental impact is in its use-phase with the consumer. Perhaps your detergent is greener to produce per mL (which gives you the certification), but you need to dose more to do your cleaning, or you need to use hotter water, or to scrub more or have a longer wash cycle. Most of these things are too difficult to measure to be included. 

Overall, Amazon’s Climate Pledge, and its Climate Pledge Friendly program is a great step forward. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. We shouldn’t view the program as the ultimate destination, but we should see it as a minimum bar that the industry needs to step up and match.