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Making and supplying medicines generates roughly a third of the global healthcare industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But Western companies say it isn’t easy to bring down that number without changing the way these drugs are produced and regulated.
Pharmaceutical companies that have committed to lowering their carbon footprint in the coming years say the main challenges arise from emissions that occur in their supply chains and as a result of how patients use some of their products. These so-called Scope 3 emissions are often the hardest to reduce because they depend on a large web of external suppliers and energy-intensive chemical processes to make medicines.
“Heat is the next main frontier, I would say, in terms of the challenge to decarbonize,” said Claire Lund, GSK’s vice president of sustainability.
GSK is tackling the sources of heat and electricity at its own operations, including phasing out gas boilers used in all of its Indian manufacturing sites.
GSK partnered with AstraZeneca, Merck KGaA, Novo Nordisk, Roche Holding, Samsung Biologics and Sanofi to form the SMI Health Systems Task Force in 2021. Last year, the partnership decided to strengthen their collaboration by focusing on cutting emissions in the near term and transitioning faster toward net-zero health systems.