Ryan Walker, senior director, sustainability, Cytiva, examines why ambition alone won’t solve sustainability in biopharma.
The biopharma industry has never lacked ambition. From developing advanced therapeutics to scaling highly regulated manufacturing environments, it is an industry built on solving complex challenges. Sustainability is now one of those challenges.
The question is no longer whether our industry cares about its environmental impact. It is whether sustainability is being embedded into the decisions that shape our future, such as product design and procurement, manufacturing, operations, and investment.
The systems that support the discovery and delivery of advanced therapeutics carry environmental impacts. Energy-intensive facilities, global supply chains, water use, and resource consumption all contribute to our footprint. The challenge is not to slow innovation, but to make sustainability part of innovation itself.
Sustainability is becoming a core business discipline
Whether we are investing in new manufacturing capacity, developing products, selecting suppliers, or designing processes, sustainability is a contributor to performance, cost, quality, and reliability. Renewable electricity, clean heat, supplier engagement, and resource efficiency are elements of a more resilient operating model.
The question before the industry now is whether we can afford not to invest in sustainability.
Better data will determine the pace of progress
Sustainability business decisions must be supported by robust data. We cannot reduce what we do not measure. Just as businesses track cost, quality, delivery, and productivity, they need reliable environmental data to understand impacts, identify opportunities, and inform decisions. Greater visibility into energy use, emissions, water consumption, material flows, and supplier performance enables leaders to make sustainability-informed choices with the same rigour applied to financial and operational metrics.
Sustainability-informed decision-making is increasingly proving to be better business decision-making. The data, insights, and disciplines developed to reduce environmental impact often reveal opportunities to improve operational efficiency, strengthen supply chain resilience, reduce risk, optimise resource use, and create long-term value. Organisations that incorporate sustainability into investment, procurement, product development, and operational decisions are not simply facilitating more sustainable choices; they are making smarter, more informed business decisions. As economic, regulatory, and customer expectations continue to evolve, sustainability is becoming a lens through which companies can identify opportunities and risks that traditional business metrics alone may overlook.
Other important tools are Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), which evaluate environmental impacts across a product's entire life cycle such as water usage, land use, and resource depletion, and Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) which quantify the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a product. Together, they help us understand environmental impacts from raw material extraction and manufacturing through transport, use, and end of life. These insights help identify where interventions can have the greatest impact and where organisations should focus their resources.
However, significant challenges remain with gaps in available data, inconsistencies in methodologies, and varying levels of transparency throughout supply chains. Product carbon footprint information is becoming more available, which is encouraging, but we need greater consistency and improved data quality across the value chain.
Better information enables better decisions. It allows organisations to prioritise effectively, benchmark progress, and focus effort where it will deliver the greatest value.
Collaboration must become the operating model
One thing is clear: no single organisation can decarbonise the biopharma value chain alone. Meaningful change happens when organisations work together to set consistent expectations about what matters and how success will be measured.
Our industry is deeply interconnected. The emissions of one organisation always sits within another organisation's value chain. Progress depends on shared expectations, common standards and collaboration across suppliers, manufacturers, customers, and industry partners.
This is particularly important because suppliers are often responding to requests from multiple customers, each with their own requirements and expectations. Greater alignment across the industry can simplify reporting, accelerate progress, and help direct investment towards more sustainable solutions. Business differentiation increasingly comes from an organisation's ability to translate sustainability ambitions into measurable business value. Companies that can use sustainability to reduce risk, improve efficiency, strengthen customer relationships, and accelerate innovation will be better positioned to outperform competitors.
In highly regulated industries such as biopharma, collaboration is essential.
Regulation should be viewed as an enabler of progress
Quality, safety, and patient access will always remain non-negotiable. Sustainability progress must happen within those constraints.
However, regulation should not be viewed solely as a barrier to change. There is tremendous value in bringing together industry, regulators, researchers, and technology providers to explore pathways that enable more sustainable materials, processes and technologies.
The most successful solutions will be those that work within existing frameworks while creating opportunities for innovation. Practical approaches that leverage existing infrastructure, maintain product quality, and reduce environmental impact have the potential to accelerate progress across the sector.
Sustainable thinking must become part of organisational culture
Ultimately, the greatest challenge is not technological; it is organisational.
When procurement teams evaluate suppliers, sustainability should sit alongside cost, quality, availability, and resilience. Sustainability metrics should also be considered alongside broader business priorities and objectives. When organisations establish expectations for suppliers and partners, sustainability should be part of those expectations.
Sustainability as a business practice means designing products with environmental impact in mind, selecting suppliers for resilience as well as cost and quality, using data to guide decisions, building product carbon footprints at the outset for transparency, and embedding environmental approaches into procurement, operations, R&D and leadership priorities.
Embedding sustainability into governance, accountability frameworks and business processes is how we move from aspiration to action. That is when sustainability becomes an operating discipline rather than a separate initiative.
The future belongs to companies that make sustainability practical
The path to a more sustainable biopharma industry will require better data, stronger standards, new technologies, regulatory engagement, and deeper collaboration.
Above all, it means recognising that health and sustainability are not competing priorities. Long term, they are inseparable.
The organisations that succeed will be those that move beyond ambition and make sustainability part of how business is done every day.
That is where the next era of progress in biopharma will be won.