Our scientists are on a mission: to discover new medicines while reducing the environmental impact of their manufacture, supply and use.
This is part of our overall environmental sustainability goal across our business, to bring in greener practices and reduce our carbon impact. Our long-term goal is for our entire ‘value chain’ – which includes supply, product distribution to customer, customer use of product and then product end of life - to be carbon neutral by 2050.
It's not easy being green
No simple set of measures will enable us to achieve these targets and many diverse approaches are needed. Our ‘green chemistry’ initiative is one of these.
A specialist chemistry unit, created earlier this year, is on call to help our R&D research scientists come up with ways to make our medicines using greener processes. For example, choosing solvents (used in the chemical processes) that can be recovered and recycled - rather than disposal by incineration - means fewer supplies are needed, less goes to waste and there is less impact on the environment.
The team, which spans sites in the UK and the US, is looking to introduce a wide range of advances, from eliminating potentially harmful waste products, to using greener substances and compounds. They’ve already developed guides to help teams to make environmentally sustainable choices and have introduced greener solvents to all labs at our four largest research sites, with plans to expand this further.
And it’s not just our specialist chemistry unit that is looking to make medicines ‘greener’. Another team, looking at the chemical synthesis and manufacture of one of our experimental medicines, has recently seen successes such as:
- using greener methods of chemistry: materials that are less toxic, easier to dispose of or recyclable
- working with processes that need less material and produce less waste
- developing ways to recycle the solvents used in chemical processes
- implementing a new waste water treatment system
- using fewer products and packaging
As a result, we have been able to cut by 80 per cent the volume of water and zinc we were sending to waste, and 21.5 million fewer tablets and 850,000 fewer plastic bottles have been produced for use in clinical trials.
Over the product lifecycle, the team will have saved an estimated 600,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of over 3,200 trips to the moon - and back - in a family car.
Green chemistry partnership with the University of Nottingham
We are also looking to the future. Our pioneering partnership with Nottingham University - announced in 2010 - will see the construction of a new facility at the University which will focus on the development of green chemistry.
The facility will support academic teaching and encourage related intellectual property R&D in the field of green chemistry, to develop cleaner and safer chemical processes that produce better, purer products.
Work on the facility will start towards the end of 2012, and is scheduled for completion in Spring 2014.
