Going Green

Everyone is going green and no one wants to be left out. Lines at Whole Foods are getting longer by the minute, celebrities are endorsing hybrid cars left and right and I am having an increasingly hard time backing out of my driveway now that it is lined with recycling bins. If we want to see our children’s children’s children flourishing in a healthy earth, we all need to go green and stay green. The same holds true for pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing.

According to research, drug manufacturers that have made efforts to improve their energy efficiency or convert their manufacturing processes to greener chemistries have seen very tangible bottom line benefits. Allergan, Inc. and Merck, for example, were both singled out this year for their energy efficiency programs by the Energy Star program, administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Benchmarking efforts and new tools promise to make it easier for all drug companies, regardless of size, to improve performance and reduce costs. We have implemented a new Green Resources Library on PharmaManufacturing. com that offers a focused, easy-to-search source of case histories and best practices that pharma and biopharma companies are using to improve their energy efficiency, reduce emissions and overall environmental impact.

It joins our Track and Trace and PAT and Quality libraries. Energy Star provides a website that facilitates sharing of energy efficiency best practices among companies, and a reference manual, “Energy Efficiency Improvement and Cost Saving Opportunities for the Pharmaceutical Industry,” sponsored by EPA and developed by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Have you developed expertise in energy efficiency or any facet of green technology as it pertains to supply chain efficiency?

Would you like to share best practices and lessons learned with your colleagues around the world? If so, please let us know. We will update the library as the green evolution progresses. We will continue to provide green resources in the form of articles, white papers, conferences, names of green consultants, as well as online manuals, product information and services.

The goal is to help answer questions and provide tools that can help facilities improve environmental performance as they provide our children’s children’s children with medication and vaccines. We hope that you’ll continue efforts to make drug manufacturing greener. Everyone’s doing it.