Does sustainability have to come at a huge cost in pharma?

Peter Gisel-Ekdahl, CEO of Envirotainer suggests that sustainability doesn’t have to come at huge expense in pharma. 

It’s a stark fact that aviation emissions are a significant contributor to climate change. Worldwide, flights produced 915 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2019, according to the Air Transport Action Group. This is a small proportion at about 2% of the overall human-caused volume. However, planes have strong warming effects owing to nitrogen oxides, vapour trails and cloud formation.

In this context, transporting drugs via air freight could have a major impact on a pharmaceutical company’s overall global warming impact. Yet in many cases, there is no choice. Treatments often require very careful cold-chain handling to ensure they get from the manufacturer to the customer in perfect condition and on time. Keeping a shipment at very low temperatures requires herculean effort and there is a limited time window for doing so. Air transport is vital to the process.

This creates a huge challenge: how do manufacturers balance logistical demands, cost and environmental impact? These competing factors seem irreconcilable at first glance. Experts would be forgiven for thinking that to reduce emissions, the cost will be higher. Or that using more air freight is going to reduce sustainability.

But this simply isn’t true. It is possible to become more sustainable and reduce costs. The trick is to consider which factors are in the control of the pharmaceutical firm and then optimise them. For example, while it might not be possible to choose a less polluting plane, it is possible to choose packaging that has a lower environmental impact and cost.

Packaging, but better

This may sound peripheral. But we need to remember that there is a huge amount of waste and cost involved in traditional methods of cold-chain packaging. Keeping a pallet of vaccines at a maximum of 6-8^oC for an entire journey traditionally requires lots of single-use plastics, dry ice, cooling, cardboard and lots of handling and manual work. Considering AstraZeneca is aiming to manufacture up to 3 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines this year alone, this all adds up.

Compare this “passive” type of packaging to an “active” solution. Instead of all the wasteful materials and resources of what is essentially a complex, yet throw-away picnic box, an active solution is more like a reusable, battery-powered fridge. These are used in a circular economy where sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling is central to their design.

Over the lifetime of their use, these thermally-controlled containers are environmentally superior. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions associated with active solutions are more than 75% lower than passive, even considering an extra leg of return transport.

The reusable option also has 60% less acidification potential, 65% less eutrophication potential, 85% less photochemical ozone potential, 85% less human toxicity potential, and 95%  less post-consumer waste.

This doesn’t even account for the handling and manpower wasted with a passive solution. Preparation can take up to five days, with coolants requiring up to three days for pre-conditioning, followed by manual assembly. Some active solutions can be fully charged from zero power in 11 hours, providing temperature stability for over a week. Some of the active containers can also be up to 35% more space efficient, which can significantly reduce the emissions per shipment.

Furthermore, when all factors are taken into account, the active solution is cheaper – or at the very least comparable in price despite much better performance. Calculating the Total Landed Cost (TLC) proves this. Put simply, TLC is the cost of packaging added to the cost of air freight, plus any auxiliary costs and the probability of the cost of product loss owing to a temperature deviation. In most cases, TLC is proven to be lower for active.

Stopping medical waste

Having said this, we must remember that while it all adds up, packaging is responsible for a relatively small proportion of carbon emissions for most pharmaceutical companies. It stands at about 3% for GlaxoSmithKline and 7% for Sanofi. The vast majority comes from manufacturing. Therefore, it’s absolutely vital that every batch made gets to its destination without a temperature deviation that would see it going to waste and therefore doubling emissions.

This is where active solutions come into their own. They truly maximise the safety of medical shipments. An active temperature-controlled container can continually keep the temperature inside constant despite it varying outside. In addition, it provides data logging and comes with a track-record of zero product losses. Put simply, active solutions are so effective that they offset their own costs.

Manufacturers’ sustainability

With such a strong environmental case for the use of active solutions, the only other question that a pharmaceutical firm may ask is whether the manufacturers themselves can prove they’re operating sustainably. In the case of Envirotainer, it became the first CO₂ neutral cold-chain company in the world in 2020. This is mainly down to the impact of its containers, which have the lowest total CO₂ per cubic meter of pharmaceutical product shipped in relation to competitors.

However, it also has a sustainability strategy linked to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are a set of 17 global goals aimed at transforming our world by 2030. Envirotainer is supporting a number of these by working with the highest standards of compliance, building strong governance structures and ethical operations.

As a result, the business not only helps its customers become more sustainable in a world where reducing environmental impact is paramount, but the firm itself is a sustainable one. And we would encourage the sector to follow suit.

Let’s not forget. The logistics industry is a well-known polluter. While aviation might be a small part of that, 8.26 gigatons, or about 26%, of CO₂ emissions globally are from transportation and many drugs do travel by truck, ship and rail. It’s therefore vital that the entire industry has a razor-sharp focus on sustainability at a time when the UN says current plans for cutting carbon emissions would lead to climate catastrophe.