• by Les Luchter , October 11, 2022

The pharmaceutical industry, responsible for 4.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, has a “passion and commitment” for environmental sustainability, but lags behind other industries in enacting change, according to James Gregson, managing partner for life sciences and healthcare at Deloitte. What’s needed, he said, is industry collaboration.

Gregson made his remarks as moderator of a Reuters webinar in which sustainability executives from four leading pharma firms discussed the sustainability problem and potential solutions.

“There’s no longer any doubt that planetary health impacts human health,” said Louise Proud, Pfizer’s vice president of global environment, health and safety. Citing such factors as air pollution causing respiratory illness and climate change contributing to health inequity, she declared that the pharma sector must “care about this issue, because truly, it is interconnected to our core business function.”

“We’re all in a business where we spend up to a decade bringing our products to market, but we have pressure to deliver results on a quarter-to-quarter basis,” said Kyra Lutz, Merck’s associate vice president ESG [environmental, social and governance] strategy and engagement. She added that the pace of technological solutions for environmental issues is almost faster than the quarterly process, so “we need to talk as an industry to address these technological innovations.”

“We need to be very transparent, learning from each other and sharing,” said Montse Montaner, former chief sustainability officer at Novartis. “We also need to look beyond the pharma sector, because other sectors are much more advanced than ourselves. The solutions they have already put in place, we need just to replicate. We don’t need to waste time to create something new.”

But pharma can’t act alone on some of its sustainability issues. It needs other players, like suppliers and regulators, to get on board.

One example came from Juliette White, AstraZeneca’s vice president global SHE [safety health and environment] and operations sustainability: “Much of our medicine is still delivered with a printed information leaflet. You fold it out and it’s about as big as the table in front of me. Yet we’re very comfortable using digital information in other ways. How do we begin to collaborate and work with regulators so that we provide equity of access, but with a lower footprint?”

White said this is also an example of an issue that one company alone can’t resolve, since government regulations cover the entire industry. The goal, she said, is to “continue to safeguard the very purpose that many of those regulations are designed for, but at greater speed and the ability to lower some of our [carbon] footprint.”

That such digitization can be done -- and very quickly, because “there was no other alternative” --was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. White said that pharma’s entire handling of COVID-19 provides a good model for the environmental sustainability crisis, ”with the same level of unifying potential” possible between pharma companies, suppliers, and regulators.

“Collaboration is going beyond the point of making collaborative commitments, when all say the same thing,” White continued.  What’s now necessary is “taking collaborative actions, where we focus on those things that others can do potentially better than us.”

She pointed to 10 pharma companies teaming with Schneider Electric to launch a renewable energy program for suppliers. “This is their expertise. They know how to provide renewable energy. We know how to discover and make medicines.”

(The program recently expanded to 12 pharma companies with the addition of Amgen and Bristol Myers Squibb.)

Merck’s Lutz concluded with a call to make industry messaging about sustainability “relatable," because “how we tell the story, how we engage our suppliers, how we engage our employees, how we work together, truly matters.

“Do we talk about it as cost-savings, do we talk about it in impact, do we talk about it in personal stories for future generations? Find that hook depending on who you’re talking to. And, for people who don’t work in this space every day, to whom Scope one, two and three sounds very complex and confusing perhaps, let’s focus on how we make it relatable and accessible for them.”

Indeed, Scope was mentioned several times during the webinar, with at least one viewer having little idea what was being discussed. (In fact, they’re different types of greenhouse gas emissions, with Scope 1 being direct emissions by a company, Scope 2 indirect emissions by the company, and Scope 3, emissions from suppliers and others in the company’s value chain.)