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Hazardous waste

More than 80% of our hazardous waste consists of solvents that are used in production processes. We also dispose of some lubricants and fluorescent lights, while research waste includes animal carcases. Our labs generate very small quantities of radioactive waste, which is highly regulated.

Regulations vary widely around the world, but our first choice for solvents is to re-use or recycle material. When this is not possible the main disposal option for solvents is incineration. We aim to use incineration with energy recovery wherever possible.

The main focus of our work to improve material efficiency is to reduce the total amount of solvents we use.

In 2005, we disposed of 68 million kg of hazardous waste (excluding demolition and construction waste). This is mostly solvents (81%), the rest being general site waste (18%) and chemical, biological or radioactive waste (1%).

In 2005, 44% of hazardous waste disposed was incinerated with energy recovery, 54% was incinerated without energy recovery. The remaining waste was disposed to licensed landfill sites.

Performance

See Note to charts

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See Note to charts

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See Note to charts

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Note to hazardous waste charts
Although the external definition of what constitutes a waste varies, for GSK reporting purposes a material is considered a waste if it is no longer fit for its originally intended purpose.

Hazardous waste disposed includes disposal to landfill and incineration either on or off GSK property. Incineration with energy recovery means burning the material and using the resulting energy. Incineration without energy recovery means burning the material without using the energy or heat generated. Hazardous waste disposed does NOT include recycling on-site or off-site or non-routine waste.

For consistent reporting, GSK considers a waste to be hazardous if it exhibits any of a number of properties as defined by the Basel Convention in 1989 of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Included in these properties are flammability, explosivity, water or air reactivity, corrosivity, oxidising potential, acute or chronic toxicity, ecotoxicity or infection. In addition, because of their nature and potential impact on research and development activities, radioactive wastes are defined as hazardous. Bioengineered and biohazardous waste is included in hazardous waste.

A waste is considered to be non-hazardous if it does not exhibit any of the hazardous properties noted above.

Total hazardous waste disposed decreased by 8% since 2004 (but is up by 9% since 2001). Hazardous waste disposed per unit sales decreased by 14% since 2004 (but increased 3% since 2001) – meaning we did not meet our 2005 target of a 15% reduction per unit sales since 2001.

Our previous trend of reducing hazardous waste per unit sales was reversed in 2004 by a combination of factors. GSK’s hazardous waste is mostly solvents and one plant scheduled for closure had to dispose of redundant solvent stocks. This had a one off impact on our data. In addition, changes to production at other plants included bringing in-house processes that were previously undertaken by contract manufacturers and moving existing processes among sites. Our engineers continued to assess how to optimise the new and moved processes to reduce solvent use and increase recycling and in 2005 we resumed the downward trend.

Solvent recovery was affected by several factors in 2005:

• we had to repair solvent recovery equipment at two sites, which resulted in complete shut-down of the recovery operation. No commercial recovery operation was available, so solvent normally recovered was incinerated instead
• new products using new solvents continue to come on line. It can take time for sites to gear up solvent recovery and recycling for these new materials
• pilot plants, which are producing our new products as they go into clinical trials, work with such a wide range of different solvents that recycling is not practical
• in 2004 some of our primary sites had difficulty handling solvents received as a result of moving processes between sites. This year some of the sites began to recover from these moves and improved their solvent recovery, thereby decreasing the amount of solvents disposed
• one new site which we acquired in 2004 contributed an additional 3 million kg to the total of solvent recycled this year.

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