Digital Insights: Go Green...Stay Green

After the never-ending winter, it is starting to look a little bit like spring. I am now battling Chicago traffic in a different kind of precipitation: rain. Lots and lots of rain. And as those few summer-like days peak through the continual showers I am reminded of just how wonderful the city can be. Flowers blooming, kids playing, and the sweet smells of grilling burgers make me hope that every spring will be this perfect. But, will it?

PharmaManufacturing.com wants to help join the efforts for a greener, cleaner world, and become a trusted resource for sustainable and energy-efficient drug manufacturing information, with our online Green Resources Library.

By visiting the site (under Topics: Green Library), you can find the latest articles and resources on how our industry is pursuing green manufacturing. A few recent additions:

• What’s Your True Green?: Drug manufacturers are turning to advanced metrics

• Prioritizing Pharma’s Green Engineering Needs: A talk with GSK’s Conchita Jimenez-Gonzalez, who chairs the ACS GCI Pharma Roundtable

• Green Gets Granular: Single-Use vs. Traditional Biopharm Process Trains: How life cycle assessment is gauging the environmental impact of single-use equipment

• Leveraging Green Metrics for Route Selection and Process Optimization: A case study from Pfizer.

There are many solution providers helping to further sustainable practices within our industry, too. In our Library, we also feature our “Green Supporters” that deserve acknowledgement and can offer solutions on maintaining sustainable operations. (Let us know if there are others we need to add.)

The social media community is also joining the fight for greener manufacturing. Here are some of our favorite green manufacturing resources:

On LinkedIn, two favorite groups include:

• Green Pharma: A forum for sustainability discussins in the pharma, biotech, and chemical industries.

• Sustainable Plant: A professional community dedicated to advancing the sustainability of manufacturing practice worldwide.

On Twitter, we have plenty of favorites: @greenpharma; @greenchembuzz; @GreenChemistry; @beyondbenign; @greenerpkg; @SustainablPlant; @SustPack; @greenbiztweets; and @nytimesgreen. (And of course there’s @PharmaMfg.)

Would you like to share best practices and lessons learned from your green initiatives? If so, please let us know and send us a draft of the article, or a 250-word abstract summarizing what you’d like to write about. We’ll work with you to develop the article for publication and/or add it to our green library. Please send your abstracts or articles to ashanley@putman.net.