Making a difference: Merck's mission to put sustainability at the heart of all it does

EPM speaks to the Life Science business of Merck to learn about the company's initiative to implement a sustainability framework across its entire R&D network.

In April 2019, the Life Science business of Merck launched a four-year initiative that was aimed at improving its sustainability efforts when it came to packaging. For a global business shipping around 30,000 packages every day, the task was enormous. From reducing the overall amount of packaging it was using, maximising recycling, improving plastics sustainability and even targeting zero deforestation, the initiative was a statement of intent by the business to begin to understand its environmental impact – and do something about it.

“Invariably we know there are opportunities to decrease the number of resources we use,” Jeffrey Whitford, head of sustainability & social business innovation at the Life Science business of Merck tells me. “SMASH Packaging was really to say we understand and recognise this is something that will require further effort, that we are focusing on it and that here is the framework so you can see exactly what we’re doing.”

Whitford admits to SMASH Packaging being a long-term project. Since 2019, the Life Science business has been collecting data and working on ways to reduce its environmental impact through projects such as a recyclable cooler for the transportation of products and the reduction of wasted space within packages.

Now, the business is increasing its ambitions with a new initiative that looks to make sustainability a core focus throughout its entire network of research and development (R&D). Ambitious is certainly the word when it comes to its Design for Sustainability (DfS) framework. The Life Science business of Merck supplies more than 300,000 products and has more than 1.6 million customers working within the science and technology sectors. Applying a sustainable thinking framework to an R&D network within a company this large is something Whitford says can cause sleepless nights.

As an internal initiative, DfS started at Merck’s facility in Molsheim, France, in 2014, where the programme was used to provide a metric for what resources were being used and potentially saved throughout product development. Looking back, the initiative was certainly worthwhile, but it wasn’t something that was going to make a large difference to the way the company operates. Launching it across the entire global business has been a gargantuan task, with Merck testing out the system from 2016 to 2018 and officially launching it in 2020.

But how does it work?

DfS takes into account seven areas that are indicative of the Life Science product portfolio – materials; suppliers & manufacturing; packaging; energy & emissions; water; usability & innovation, and the circular economy.

Since the product portfolio is so large, DfS had to be developed to provide the business with “a flexible framework that allows us to address something that is a piece of equipment but that in another area is a chemical or a biologic product,” Whitford says.

Seeing what materials are being used throughout a product’s development, how it is then transported across the globe or how much water or energy is used throughout that product’s lifecycle, enables Merck to look at each product from a sustainability perspective and ask if it could be doing a better job.

A recent example of this was the development of two laboratory-based filtration systems, which were designed with the DfS framework in mind. Previous products were used with the media being poured in through a top container, going through a filter, before coming out in a bottom container. Using a usability innovation approach, Merck was able to remove the top container to allow bottles to simply be screwed onto the filter unit – resulting in the reduction of up to 47% of plastic, less emissions due to a smaller product and other beneficial, sustainable savings.

These metrics are released by Merck in a DfS scorecard for each product or service, which really highlights just how transparent the company is being with this initiative.

“Trust is at the centre of all of this. If there isn’t trust and transparency, we don’t have a chance of doing this successfully. That means you have to have a semi-radical level of transparency you have to give to customers,” Whitford tells me.

Of course, with such a large product portfolio, the company has to be realistic about its chances of successfully making sustainable savings across its entire R&D network.

“Every product isn’t going to come out being sustainable but what we have done is we’ve included it as part of the checklist process,” Whitford says. “It could be that we were able to significantly reduce water usage but then something else went up because of that. But we need to be clear about it so the customer can then understand how we did it and why we did it.”

Some would argue that there’s an inherent level of reputational risk that comes with a company being this transparent about its environmental footprint. Whitford though says that these are the conversations we need to be having.

“The differentiator is to know what your [environmental] footprint looks like when you do business with us. I hope that more companies, regardless of their industry, take that into mind and think about giving people more information about the choices they are making, because it does have an impact on the long term.”

Within life sciences, the ultimate gauge for success has been whether or not products are providing a benefit to people’s lives. Whitford argues that that goal can still be the main target, but it can be achieved in a manner where people ask questions as to how it was achieved in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Throughout our conversation, Whitford stresses that the DfS framework, much like SMASH Packaging, is a long-term focus. Merck now has its framework set up, but gathering the data and digging deeper into its larger supply chain is a task that won’t be accomplished overnight.

“The message here though is that this is going to be a process. This is an ambitious and tough project. Having taken that step with the framework, now it’s about educating people about it, getting them comfortable with it, getting them thinking about usability. So, one step done but we’ve got a lot of steps ahead of us.”