Hosted across two days in Lugano, Switzerland, speakers at the DCAT Sustainability Summit tackled the sustainability question.
Broadly speaking, the sustainability question remains unanswered. Not in the sense of whether sustainability should be a priority – consensus among biopharma industry professionals has fallen in its favour for quite some time— but rather in exactly how this should be done. Indeed, framing it as the ‘sustainability question’ is a false premise, because sustainability encompasses a diverse set of interlocking factors. Each of these factors must be considered not only within the context of one’s individual business, but also the landscape of the broader biopharma industry.
The conference aimed to address the topic in the holistic manner that is necessary. Speakers discussed various aspects of sustainability, including best practices for pharmaceutical suppliers, how to prioritise sustainability throughout the entirety of product development and more.
Sustainability: the business imperative— a global overview
Following opening remarks, the DCAT Summit opened with a discussion hosted by Suraj Matthew, Partner, Life Sciences, Kearney, and Sarah Kerrigan, Director, Sustainability, Kearney.
“With all the complex issues that are already out there, we are asking ourselves to add another equation, another variable to the equation, sustainability, in many of the dinner conversations,” said Matthew in his opening remarks.
This panel featured an extended discussion on the risks and opportunities sustainability brings across the value chain, but one aspect worth highlighting is how it discussed scope and why collaboration is key in establishing sustainable processes.
Sustainability can be broken down into three scopes. Scope one consists of company facilities, while scope two considers company purchases; both of these fall under a company’s direct operations, albeit in different facets. According to Kerrigan, individuals polled among those attending the Summit had, broadly speaking, a good handle on their scope one and two emissions; 39% of attendees were very familiar, while just 3% were not familiar.
Scope three, however, considers indirect impacts of sustainability, or ‘your extended value chain, upstream and downstream’, and while a similar number (38%) were very familiar with this aspect of their emissions, many more (11%) were not familiar with their companies’ numbers in this scope – a particularly concerning number given the sampling bias of individuals attending a conference on sustainability. This number can prove difficult to reduce, even among model companies who work doggedly to reduce their emissions, as it requires collaboration with other companies.
“So whilst we’re [still] seeing companies making absolute scope three targets saying, yes, we can reduce our scope three emissions by 30% by 2030, we’re actually seeing a trend of organisations now moving from setting absolute targets to supplier engagement targets, recognising that they don’t have that immediate control to make those reductions. Instead, they’re going to have to work collaboratively [not only] with their peers, but also with the suppliers within the industry,” said Kerrigan.
“This point really highlights why this conference today is so critical – to ensure that we have an industry dialogue and share best practices, share learnings, because the challenge that lies ahead for one company must be tackled by all,” added Kerrigan. “So, how do we work on this, collaboratively and as a supplier?”
For Kerrigan and Matthew, there are many steps you can take, including data-based initiatives and targeting discrete areas of the value chain for changes. Fundamentally, however, they believe that sustainability must be thought of not as a requirement or compliance action, but as an investment that intersects with conventional business decisions surrounding cost reduction and revenue increases.
“It’s important that you always, always, always think about the business value that can be derived from sustainability and tie it back to any investment that you’re making in sustainability, whether it’s head count, technology, new interventions or innovations,” said Kerrigan. “Really drive it through and think through ultimately, how is this contributing either to a cost reduction or to a revenue increase.”
The sustainability edge: supplier best practices
Christian Seufert, President, Capsules Division, Lonza, and Jonothan Hamer, Vice-President, Global Procurement Organization, Curia, hosted a round table in which they tackled the role of suppliers in building sustainability. The pair used their experiences to discuss how their companies have worked with suppliers to build sustainability within existing infrastructure, as a model for other companies to take inspiration from.
According to Seufert, Lonza identified sustainability as one of its five strategic pillars and developed seven sustainable development goals (SDGs) to focus on in tandem. This led to them looking into sustainability goals that could tie into business interest and ultimately led to the development of various near and long-term sustainability goals. Of note is their goal to source entirely renewable energy by 2025, a goal he states Lonza is well on its way to after partnering with four pharmaceutical companies to bundle demand and source renewable at market competitive costs.
“I think what is super important [is] that, as a company, in particular from our operations unit, we set what we call sustainable design standards,” said Seufert. “So every project, large or small, that goes through some sort of engineering is vetted against sustainable design standards that need to be complied with. This, by the way, from my perspective, does not only ensure that we’re on the right path for sustainability, but also may, in the one or the other case, actually save costs.”
Seufert went on to point to various initiatives, such as Lonza’s solvent recycling operations in Singapore, rain harvesting in Colmar, that both promoted sustainability and reduced costs. The company has developed a responsible sourcing team that works to build strategic partnerships with other firms interested in promoting sustainability, enhancing collaborative efforts. Simultaneously, efforts are made to internally build a culture that promotes sustainability not only from the top-down, but also engaging rank and file employees to promote measures from the bottom-up.
Hamer discussed how due diligence is vital in sourcing from suppliers. While QA audits and supplier research, both of which are designed to identify sustainable suppliers, often happen, according to Hamer they functionally serve as a rubber stamp intended to protect the company against litigation or reputational harm. If a QA audit happens every two years, is that really giving a discrete insight into the inner operations of the site?
According to Hamer, it’s not enough to look at the surface for sustainability, because other companies may lie, exaggerate or minimise their anti-ESG practices. To mitigate the potential for harm, Hamer discussed how he handles an average site inspection.
“They say, ‘Where would you like to go?’ fully expecting me to say production and warehouse. And I do say production and warehouse,” said Hamer. “But I also say, ‘and I want to go to the effluent treatment plant. I want to go to your construction facilities. I want to go literally everywhere on your site,’ and that usually gets people scrambling. So usually one person goes out of the room and you see people literally running around the site trying to get things in order, because they were not expecting you to go to all parts of the site.”
Hamer’s approach is based around inspecting everything. Is there ground contamination that could lead to contaminated water run-off? Has an explosion risk analysis been performed? Is the scaffolding made out of metal or a weaker material like bamboo? If there is anything that has a remote risk of impacting a supplier’s approach to sustainability, it needs to be examined, and firm expectations and consequences must be established with suppliers. If deep collaboration with sustainable suppliers is the carrot, then searching for the slightest discrepancies and refusing to work with those, who can’t meet expectations, is the stick.
Sustainability and product development
The last panel we’ll be taking a deep dive into is one focused on sustainability in terms of product development. The panel was hosted by Dr Samantha Gordine, Sustainability Solutions Lead, Arcondis; Dr. Arne Kloke, President, Alliance To Zero and Head of Sustainability, SCHOTT Pharma; and Dora Rio, Global Head of Sustainability, SHL Medical AG. A key theme of this panel was the role of collaboration in not only developing products, but product development models.
Dr Gordine discussed her company’s vision of the Future Lab, a project designed to ‘modernise interoperability’ within labs. This is a multi-faceted concept, but can be understood as bringing different contexts together to consider various perspectives and potential solutions; in other words, collaborations, both internal and external. This is especially critical when working in a program that strives for continuous improvement, as it prevents the silo effect of sustainability discussions and maintains lab productivity.
“Labs are operational environments. They need to keep going. You have a certain agenda where you have that lab in the first place, you can’t just stop the lab for half a year or a year to upgrade it and wait for the next big thing to happen,” said Dr Gordine. “You need to do what you’re doing with your lab in the first place and you can’t just take staff away and say, ‘Okay, now you’re just focusing on sustainability and making that lab sustainable’. So that is the other part where we really try and address saying, ‘Can we make that more efficient? Can we make it as painless as possible?’ in collaboration with the My Green Lab team.”
In a similar vein, Dr Kloke discussed his Alliance to Zero initiative, which aims to facilitate the biopharma industry into a net-zero carbon emitter. By acting as an outside force, they aim to facilitate connection by developing a ‘joint language’ that can merge the goals of various businesses. This often results in challenging existing practices and conventions, such as the limits on recycled material use in auto-injectors.
“You touch [auto-injectors] for maybe ten seconds to give you one injection, not touching any open thing on your body, but we cannot use recycled materials in there. So that’s where we then use the sandbox to challenge that, reaching out to others,” said Dr Kloke. “We’re not the industry, but we’re a small club that, in a very open way, is having a debate and if we require [there] to be more [voices], we just reach out to more [companies]. We’re trying to bring that down into pharma language and really challenge in what way we can bring recycled material in there.”
Rio’s presentation focused on scope three sustainability, which is estimated to account for 90% of the waste profile for all health care companies. Rio further drilled this down to packaging suppliers and device manufacturers contributing a majority of that waste, which necessitates working with these companies to reduce that share.
However, in her experience working with a medical device company, Rio highlighted many practical concerns over sustainability. Rio cites how her company wants to reach eight million customers, but how will they do it with additional constraints brought about by sustainable practices that ignore a profit-driven reality? Can those costs simply be passed on to the consumer that, as a patient, is in a uniquely vulnerable position? Finding the right balance requires more than simply requesting sustainability from a potential partner and that requires interfacing with a potential partner’s entire value chain and considering what one is requesting from them.
“We need to have more consensus of what the sustainable device is, more consensus about echo design principles, because all companies are now committing with that, but what we call a sustainable device – is [it] a sustainable device because we have reduced emissions by 0.5%, because we did a shift for renewables? Or is it slightly more than that?” asked Rio.
“The ambition we all have with the targets and goals there are [have] become now aligned, but now we need to make it happen,” added Rio, “and there are trade-offs and there are prices to be shared as well”.
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*US-based Editor working for Chemicals Knowledge Hub presents a selection of various panels from the conference.