Interview with Joachim Almdal

Transcript

[Sheldon Young]
Welcome to No Footprints, a podcast brought to you by Alfa Laval. I’m Sheldon Young.

[Jason Moreau]
And I’m Jason Moreau.

[Sheldon Young]
And we’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts and people behind making sustainability real. Aren’t we, aren’t we Jason?

[Jason Moreau]
Indeed, yes.

[Sheldon Young]
We do. So we have a, we have a way of, of bringing these conversations to life.

[Jason Moreau]
So I’ve heard that’s the word on the street. People are talking. That’s what they’re saying.

[Sheldon Young]
I know it’s up in, up in lights everywhere I go, uh, overcoming a little bit of a cold Jason. I’m not going to lie to you.

[Jason Moreau]
Well, I don’t think, I don’t think you’d need to apologize or feel bad about that because sometimes it adds a, like a tenor and a, and a, like a, a nice timbre rasp timbre. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Not that your normal podcasting voice isn’t already like super smooth and velvety, but I mean, you know, you just get that extra little half octave down.

It’s like, yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. Nice. It sounded like I’m a, you know, the, the, the velvety voice, let’s go with velvet.

I like that word. My velvety voice.

[Jason Moreau]
You’re like the Mel Torme of sustainability.

[Sheldon Young]
Wow. Wow. You just lost half the audience.

There you go. But you know who he is. I know Mel Torme.

Yes. Of course I do.

[Jason Moreau]
The velvet fog.

[Sheldon Young]
Right. That was his nickname. Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah. I forgot about that. Anyway.

So, um, what do you have for a story? Give me, kick this thing off. Give me something good.

[Jason Moreau]
Well, I have a sustainability and a packaging and a marketing story.

[Sheldon Young]
Whoa.

[Jason Moreau]
All the same story.

[Joachim Almdal]
Right?

[Jason Moreau]
No, it’s not three. It’s all about the one. So a really interesting one about wine.

And so it was a study conducted with about 2000 consumers and they wanted to understand how packaging essentially impacted people’s purchase decision, but what would happen if they had more information about how recyclable or how much of a carbon footprint there was for certain packaging over other packaging, right? So standard is glass bottle wine. So that’s, that’s sort of everything is benchmarked to that.

And then you have aluminum cans as an alternative. And then you have a PET, the plastic, and then just like a, like a bag. And what was really, really interesting, and I should say that they, they wanted to understand it because a third of the total carbon footprint associated with wine production is primarily due to the use of the glass bottles.

[Sheldon Young]
That makes sense.

[Jason Moreau]
So if there were more sustainable, less carbon intensive alternatives, like we want to do that, but this is where the marketing is really interesting because the perception of the consumer is that if the wine is in a glass bottle, it’s a better wine. Like they are literally willing to pay twice as much compared to a wine in a bag or a box.

Right.

[Sheldon Young]
And so it does come with an association for sure.

[Jason Moreau]
Correct. Yeah. And a very long association, right?

It’s hundreds of years that wine has been shipped in glass bottles. So what they found though, is that they were able to improve that, that gap by explaining the carbon footprint and the sustainability. And in some cases, get it pretty close to even.

And it depended obviously where you were starting from. Aluminum was like the second most preferred, but that’s because they’re used to buying other beverages in aluminum. And so that perceived quality dip is less with aluminum than with like a bag.

So no, I thought it was really interesting research. And it just that reminder that you need to clearly communicate what the sustainability cost is, what the, like, what are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?

Especially if, for example, you were a beverage manufacturer and you decided you wanted to be more sustainable. You wanted to reduce carbon footprint. Okay.

Let’s use the box or the bag, but you need to explain that to the consumer. And if you can explain it, you can close that gap and still essentially sell your wine for what it would be in the glass bottle. But only if the consumer clearly understands that that’s why they’re getting it.

Correct.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, interesting. Huh? Yeah. I think it’s, it’s interesting.

It has a really interesting story. It gets funny. It ties a little bit to what my story is.

[Jason Moreau]
Okay.

[Sheldon Young]
I’m like, I think maybe I shared this with the camera if I did or not. One of our former guests, Caroline Cotta, had posted something around this. The Washington Post had an article around, like, plant-based meat and why taste matters, but it’s not all that matters.

Connection to the associated product also matters. For example, a hamburger. You know, a hamburger, when you go to a barbecue or a cookout.

Sorry, a barbecue. If you’re from the South, barbecue is very different than a cookout. If you go to a cookout, you know, the association of, like, a beef hamburger or a hot dog is kind of there or a ballpark or a ballgame.

[Jason Moreau]
Sure.

[Sheldon Young]
And so that connection to the emotions you have and what goes with that product. You know, like, I want a beef hamburger when I go to the cookout, right? I don’t want a plant-based burger.

That association matters. And so as part of the story of how do you move forward with, like, I’m going to call it, you know, alternatives or blended products or whatever they are, it’s like you have to kind of think about that connection. How do you create new connections or new associations in order to adopt those products into those situations?

And so it’s really, I didn’t get a chance to read the article. It was behind a paywall. But what it did lead to me is it really got my thinking.

And she listed a couple of folks. And so we’re going to have a couple new guests coming up. So based on that article, we have a couple of guests that are going to come talk about these aspects of that story.

And so for me, it’s like, yeah, that’s really interesting. Because as we think about how do you move, how do you change people and change their behavior, you have to think about the associations of the situations that they’re in. And how do you create a connection to a product in that situation?

And that’s going to be really interesting. It’s kind of the next level.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, next level of the journey. So what you’re talking about in marketing parlance is called a category entry point. And it’s when the consumer associates something going on in their life with this is the product I want in this instance.

So cookout, burger. But exactly to your point, you can create those if they don’t exist. And a great example of this is way back when Coca-Cola decided, you know what?

When people think of Christmas, we want them to think of Coca-Cola. And they invented our whole modern idea of Santa Claus came from all of those illustrations. And so like, you know, the holidays are coming and all of that stuff.

[Sheldon Young]
The color red.

[Jason Moreau]
It’s Coca-Cola red. Correct. Yeah.

So they essentially, you know, like most things, marketing pioneered it, but it works.

[Sheldon Young]
Interesting. Yep. Yeah.

Wow. Interesting. Hmm.

That’s fun stuff. You know what else works, Jason?

[Jason Moreau]
I’m waiting for this segue. Go for it.

[Sheldon Young]
I don’t know what works. Our guest. Our guest works.

Our guest works in so many ways in the world of pharmaceuticals. And I met Joachim Amdahl on LinkedIn, actually. So the platform pulled through for me there.

I saw him actually, I think, in some post about something and decided that we needed to talk. And he agreed to. And just had a great conversation.

Gave me a better understanding on how the pharma world thinks about sustainability. Because that’s his world. And we’re going to kind of talk to him today.

Kind of learn what he’s learned about it as being a consultant for sustainability in pharma. And I’m really excited to talk to him and have him on. And what do you say we get to it, Jason?

I think we should listen. I like the sound. Let’s go.

Mm-hmm. Today’s guest on No Footprints is Joachim Amdahl. A passionate sustainability advocate with a rich background in environmental leadership and innovation.

With years of experience driving green initiatives and empowering teams, Joachim brings both expertise and heart to the world of sustainable change in the pharma industry. Let’s dive into his journey and insights. Welcome, Joachim, to the podcast.

[Joachim Almdal]
Thank you very much, Sheldon. Thank you very much, Jason. That was some really kind words.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, you know, I try. I like people to feel great when they step into the No Footprints realm. And you learned it.

Like I say, I just look at your history and it’s all there, my friend. You’ve done some good things. Speaking of good things, tell us your story a little bit.

What kind of drew you to sustainability and specifically to sustainability in pharma? Because you’re very specialized.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, yeah. So if we start today, we are a very small management consultant company called Care Pathway Consulting. And we solely work with sustainability in pharma and healthcare.

So, of course, today we’re of course mainly going to talk about manufacturing, I assume, where we do a lot. But we actually work across the full value chain and care pathways. So we also work with the R&D and clinical trials, departments of the pharma companies, all the way out to market access and commercial and patient engagement and so on.

[Sheldon Young]
We could talk about the whole thing. We don’t limit ourselves to manufacturing here. I think just because we do that at Alfa Laval doesn’t mean – this is about making sustainability real.

I want to hear how you do that. So talk about Care Pathway. Give us how you engage with a pharma company to achieve sustainability.

Just talk about that a little bit.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, for sure. Pharma clients are our main customers, our clients. But we also work with the actual healthcare systems.

I think that’s very important. At the end of the day, if nothing changes out by the patients and doctors, we’re not getting the change that we need. And I actually have a business background, which I think is very central for how we work as well.

Our core philosophy and what we really work with is we don’t do reporting. We don’t do GHG accounting. We don’t work very much with the ESG reports.

Of course, everything that we do tie into those deliverables. But our job is really to help the corporate strategy that’s in those slides at headquarters, the CEO office or wherever. How do we take that and make sense out at a factory site, out at a given clinical trial, out in a local sales affiliate for a pharma?

Because this is true for every industry, but especially in these very large pharma organizations, we might have 50,000 or 100,000 employees or even more. It’s a cliche, but it’s still true that headquarters will make a strategy on some slides and then just assume, okay, we’re going to airdrop this down and then they’re probably going to do it. Magic.

It’s magic. So that’s our job. Our job is to co-create with a factory or a clinical trial organization or a sales affiliate and figure out, okay, which part of this is responsible, which part of this can create value for us.

How do we prioritize? And if we’re going to do this, where are we today and what do we need to be able to do? And how do we close that gap?

Whether that’s on data processes or skills or capabilities or hiring more people or whatever that might be. To give some specific examples, we have, I think it’s actually a public case, but just to be sure, I’m not going to name the pharma company. But very large, very well-known top 10 pharma company.

We helped their manufacturing organization co-create a governance and maturity framework for sustainability. Sounds very dry, very boring, but basically what it meant is that by creating this tool, they were able to say for each site and each group of factory sites, they have over 20 factory sites globally. Where is this site on water, on energy, on waste, on procurement?

And what do they need to do next to improve? And that was a big game changer because that allowed them to focus. There are so many things to do in sustainability.

And it actually gets worse the more you learn, the more mature you get. The more things you find out, hey, there’s also biodiversity over here and waste water is not just waste water. It ties into all these things and that gives what I call the Netflix effect often.

Is that you end up spending your whole Friday night picking a movie because there’s so many things you could watch rather than actually watching a movie. So there is this Netflix effect or analysis paralysis sometimes around sustainability. And this model helped them say, all right, we’re at level three for water.

We need to tick these boxes. We need to start circulating the water from our cooling towers or whatever it might be or clean our tanks differently. We’re not the technical experts.

So we go in, my partner started the company with, he’s a medical anthropologist. So we’re very comfortable in not having the technical expertise and passing these stupid questions on and saying, all right.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah. Okay, good. Side quest, medical anthropologist.

I’ve never heard that before. It sounds really interesting. Can you just briefly describe that?

Because I’m really curious how that ties into the sustainability work.

[Joachim Almdal]
Super interesting. Yeah, for sure. So I’m for sure going to get it wrong.

He has a university master’s degree in anthropology. And like really old school anthropology, going out, meeting indigenous people, doing a lot of field work. He spent a lot of time studying small eco societies in rural Mexico and other places.

Because he had this intuition that that was what was needed to solve the global climate crisis and planetary boundary crisis. And his realization was that, all right, we’re never going to get anybody to, nobody’s going to want to live in mud huts and other things. So it’s very, not even a percentage of the world population that that’s a good path for.

Okay, we need to actually work with the large existing systems and corporates and so on. But as part of that anthropology master’s degree, he specialized in medical anthropology, which is basically the human side and the human interaction of healthcare systems and everything that goes around that. So Frederik Vanders, who I co-founded the company with over 10 years ago, he’s super, super good at figuring out what’s the logic here?

What kind of language that was being, that’s actually, so coming back to that factory model, we made a big deal out of co-creating it with the sustainability teams, also the leadership teams at the various engineering teams. Because it actually, it matters. If you’re at a factory site, you need to speak the language of time and throughput and put it in terms that make sense, create value for them.

If they’re measuring their waste in volume as to weight or the other way around, it matters to them that it feels like the tool belongs to them and it’s not being pushed down from above. And the only way you’re getting to that is by building it with the people who are going to use it and going to own it. So that’s one of our key tools around creating local ownership, which is, again, sounds fluffy, but it’s just so important.

Because that magic distinction between airdropping strategy slides from headquarters and then expecting change, it just doesn’t happen. So just to close the other case, we created this tool that divided the sustainability journey into these four arenas. Water, waste, energy and procurement.

That we then chopped into different stages to say energy, stage one, using coal, that’s an absolute no-go for our company. You need to get out of there as fast as possible and so on. So covering the Netflix effect of making it very explicit what needs to happen next.

But then what it also allowed was that it allows us to tie it into management accountability. To then say put it in leadership meetings, have a scoreboard, say you need to be here. So yeah, what the maturity of each factory side allowed us to do was also to tie it into the management reviews.

And that’s another one of our key tasks when we help our clients is to figure out which spreadsheet and which leadership meeting does this go into. Because the super tankers of pharma companies, it sounds a bit stiff and it is. I mean, they are run by these yearly cycles, they are run by spreadsheet, they are run by management meetings and committees.

And if you don’t live in there with your sustainability target, with somebody being responsible, it’s not going to move. You just hit a glass ceiling of what you can do.

[Jason Moreau]
I was kind of curious. So from the anthropological lens, like every company is sort of its own unique entity, you know, sort of just it’s unique. But I was wondering, are there larger trends in the pharmaceutical industry that sort of cut across that you see where there’s sort of these shared either initiatives or challenges with all of the different companies that you work with?

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, so I think that’s one of the things that makes me really hopeful is that there’s a lot of industry collaboration, actually. And you wouldn’t think that it’s very IP intensive industry, lots of lawsuits and different things. Somehow that’s not the same in sustainability.

So you have great initiatives like the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, Sustainable Markets Initiative, where people are getting together to try and solve problems, but also where they are coming up with common methodology. You both have a lot of the existing industry organizations like PDA or FPI or other things. If you’re in the industry, these names might make sense for you, but basically the established ones that have also adopted sustainability work.

And then you have dedicated ones like the Sustainability Market Initiative, which is seven of the largest pharma companies, including Novanoidis and AstraZeneca and others that have gotten together and say, we want to make some commitment that goes beyond. We want to create shared methodology. There are, I mean, one of the incentives is, of course, that we’re slowly seeing the, slowly but surely, at least in Europe and Canada, Singapore and other places, the integration of commercial demands on sustainability in pharma.

And that’s a real big game changer because that moves us from a nice to have to a need to have. And that is driven by the various healthcare systems having their own net zero goals. And their largest issue is scope-free, so their suppliers as well.

So that pushes that on to pharma. And naturally, the more aligned those requirements are, the more they are similar from market to market, the lower the administrative burden. So that’s one of the incentives for collaborating, just as we’ve seen in a lot of other arenas, but now also just for sustainability.

It’s moved a lot faster in medtech. So in medtech, it’s…

[Sheldon Young]
Sorry, define medtech. How do you define medtech? Sorry.

[Joachim Almdal]
It’s a bit… It’s not a complete clear-cut definition. But if you go through the FDA or the EMA, it’s different categories.

But medtech is devices and pharma is molecules. There’s a lot of things where you think it would be one, but then it’s the other. But in general, pharma is drugs.

You take a pill or inject something, a device would be something for surgery or even compression thighs or other things. A lot of things can be medical equipment. Got it.

I think if I had to talk about one big trend that I see, which is thankfully coming from a very low place, is that… So healthcare, and I think you especially experience this in the US, but it’s just as true in Europe, is an industry under pressure. So already from an economic standpoint and in terms of how many professionals are needed, nurses, doctors, and other things, it’s not sustainable at the moment.

They’re under a tremendous amount of pressure. The same is actually true for sustainability. Perhaps we should have started there.

[Sheldon Young]
I was going to ask what are some of the barriers that you are seeing in sustainability in pharma? So maybe that’s a good place to dive into.

[Joachim Almdal]
For healthcare, if we take it all the way on the top, it’s around 5% of global emissions, CO2 emissions coming from healthcare. That’s a lot. That would be one of the biggest countries in the world in terms of emissions.

And it’s only going to grow because when we look at the developing countries, which have every right to do so, when you have food in your tummy and roof over your head, one of the first things you begin spending more on is healthcare. And these 5% emissions are driven by that we spend a lot of our resources and money on healthcare. So a good rule of thumb is that many Western countries will spend maybe 10% of GDP on healthcare, I think it’s higher in the US.

And that also means that those 5% of CO2 emissions, that’s a global average. If we are looking in the West, we’re closer to 7 to 10% of emissions coming from healthcare. And that’s where the care pathway perspective comes in.

And the reason why we call ourselves care pathway consulting is a care pathway is basically the patient’s journey from their diagnosis throughout the system. And it’s a very natural step to look at the emissions of a product when you work with sustainability. And you’re going to say, okay, what are the CO2 emissions coming from this pill or from this device?

That’s also important as something we should work on. But what the research also shows is actually that quite often, if you look at it from a patient journey or care pathway perspective, it’s probably only something like 10 to 15% of the CO2 emissions that are coming from the drug or the device. The rest is patient transport, being hospitalized, follow-on diseases, all these other things.

And that means that even if we could do a zero CO2 drug, you’re still left with the other 90% of the CO2 emissions.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, I didn’t even think about it that way. It’s that scope three almost. If you’re a drug company, you’re looking at the scope three emissions, everything that’s created from the use of your product and that goes in all around it.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, and that’s not to diminish the responsibility in pharma manufacturing and other places, which is important. But even more important is that patients are well treated and that we take measures on preventive health care and diagnose them early. There are some caveats you can do over diagnosis.

The way that we try to describe this is that you can actually make a pretty simple equation that says we want to deliver more health outcomes or qualities, quality adjusted life years. That’s a health economic term for measuring health. We want more health outcomes per unit of CO2.

Just as when we’re working in health economics, we want more health outcomes per dollar spent.

[Sheldon Young]
That’s a really interesting sustainability metric. When you think about what you put in your scorecard, it must be powerful because, again, if you work for a drug company or pharma company, that’s your goal. It’s the goal of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

The company, you obviously want to be profitable and all that fun stuff. But the purpose of the drug itself is to save human lives or improve the life of a human or animal, I guess, if you’re in that market. What an interesting way to think about sustainability in terms of that metric and the CO2 you use to get to those.

[Joachim Almdal]
It’s a way of carving a path through the whole system. One way is you’re just looking at the product level and the lifecycle analysis. If you’re looking through the greenhouse gas protocol that the science-based target is built on, which is how companies, organizations report on CO2 and how they set goals, that’s the most established one.

Anyway, we’re talking about scope one, two, and three. That’s where that comes from. In healthcare, you run into a lot of problems because for a specific hospital, the patients transport to and from just quite a bit of the admissions, for instance.

They’re not counted for that because they become the scope three of the hospital and the primary sector, the general practitioners as well. They are not in that as well. But the planet doesn’t care whether it was one accounting or the other.

So how do you create something where you’re not just moving the monkey from one place to another and you can make a more informed decision where you’re not just sub-optimizing? That also allows you to spend more CO2 in certain places or more resources, which, for instance, could be that if there’s this patient group, for instance, it could be people with diabetes. There’s pretty good research now that showed a well-treated patient with diabetes, meaning that they take their insulin on time and in the right doses and so on.

Even though that insulin costs some CO2, that saves you a lot of healthcare resources further down from the complications and follow-up, but it actually also saves a lot of CO2 and enough CO2 that it’s better to spend that CO2 on the insulin for the patient. But it’s complicated and it’s long and it’s dedicated wording. It’s not how the incentives are set up because most pharma companies are very still quarter-based and more focused on the isolated.

How do we get more drug out now and not how do we – I mean, the U.S. is one of the best companies. It’s a business, but it can also still be a good business. I mean, the U.S. healthcare system, I’m no expert at all, but that’s one of the best examples. You would never build something like that from scratch. There’s this very – I mean, I think – Oh, you are an expert.

[Sheldon Young]
That’s kind of the truth, yeah.

[Joachim Almdal]
I had a guy on our podcast, the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast, Seamus Plug, he described the U.S. healthcare system as a game of monopoly where every step you take as a patient, you have to pay something for it. I think just to round it off, the care pathway perspective of how we get better health outcomes per unit of CO2 allows for a very interesting lens that has the possibility to solve the crisis much better, I think, because it allows you to focus more on the things that we know work in terms of prevention and early diagnosis, which at least in theory can build in better incentives.

[Jason Moreau]
It strikes me that one of the things that you’re doing for your clients is essentially giving them language that they might not already have to better define their own objectives, some of the challenges that they’re facing, which I think is a really interesting space to play in. It’s also, I think, really challenging to – I think in a lot of cases, it might be they don’t know that that’s the thing that they’re missing, that that’s the missing connective tissue to get them from the slide deck to effective implementation. How do you talk about it from a marketing standpoint?

When you’re talking to clients, how do you convince them that the thing they don’t know they need is the thing they actually need?

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think we’re particularly good at marketing, but we have somehow managed as a very small – we’re a two-person company by design. It used to be a lot more, but then we got small kids and decided that we’d rather be small and nimble.

But I think a lot of what we basically – it just takes years, so we just spend a lot of time building trust and relationships with people. And then one or two years down the line, suddenly they have a need that we can help address. And I think one of the challenges that we see is that – I like this analogy that if you talk to any pharma life science company and you go back to the 80s, they would say, yeah, we’re not an IT company.

We’re not a tech company. It’s not what we do. And then time passed, and it’s like, yeah, we’ve got the IT department.

That’s great. They do the IT stuff. And now we know not everybody has to write code.

Well, maybe soon. Who knows? But you cannot sit in manufacturing or supply chain and somewhere and say, well, the IT department does the IT stuff.

We’re not going to use IT. And I think that’s one of the trap options that we run into is that they finally manage to get a sustainability professional on their team or dedicated team, maybe yourself, Sheldon, and then it becomes like, ah, great. Those guys, they do the sustainability stuff.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yeah.

[Joachim Almdal]
That’s the other way around. The sustainability team should be the coaches and the enablers, not the players, not the fixes. So, I think a lot of how we try to engage is what are you going to do anyway?

Because let’s also just face it, that sustainability, especially in 2026, it’s not a powerful mandate, especially not in the US. There’s not a lot of resources, but that was also true a couple of years ago, but there’s been some changes for sure globally in the mandate. So, start with what are you trying to do anyway?

Because that’s where the organization is going to be focused. All right, you’re in a cost-cutting phase or you’re trying to digitalize or expand market over here, whatever you’re doing. There are always sustainability things that we can do within those.

And if we work within those existing strategy tracks, we’re going to get much further. And then, we talked about language before, Jason. I think often we are able to place our clients on a journey where they’re not starting from scratch.

Because a lot of people, even like we work with very skilled engineering teams that didn’t look at themselves like doing sustainability work. They just reused ethanol seven times because it was the obvious thing to do. You’d be stupid not to and we could make this cool technological solution for it.

But no, no, I’m not working with sustainability. I’m just taking this resource. So, we have that a lot as well that we’re sometimes often able to help people see that they’re already on journey and they’re already doing good stuff.

And that if they push more in this area, they can go further. But they are not just in the starting block. Because we all know that it’s harder to…

If I never run before, that first run is harder than if it’s… Oh yeah, I do it. I just don’t do it that often or whatever it is.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, I could say your words are ringing true. Jason’s heard me say this a thousand times, but it’s like sustainability, productivity and profitability. You can’t disassociate the three, right?

They connect. Optimization, productivity, whatever word you want to use. At the end of the day, sustainability is good business if you do it right.

And so, just having a pathway you can show them around that is totally the role that you can play being a sustainability champion at an organization. And following the momentum is definitely a smart tactic. And the world needs more people like yourself that are shepherding people through, hey, what does this really mean?

These sustainability goals aren’t some big fluffy thing we threw up in the air. They are real and they can be good for your productivity, they can be good for your bottom line.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah. And then I alluded to it before, but one of the key things we do is that we take a systematic and structured approach. And help get sustainability into the governance and management systems.

Contrary to that is what we call the hero approach. We have yet to find a pharma company that didn’t have incredibly passionate employees who did things that wasn’t supposed to be able to get done, but got it done anyway out of sheer passion. I’m sure you guys are good examples of that.

And that’s amazing. And we love that. And those heroes, as we call them, are great starting points.

But you just hit a glass ceiling. In a big corporate environment, you can only go so far in passion before somebody comes and says, hey, that was great, but spending 50% of your time doing this thing that you’re not really supposed to be doing, or that sounds great, but it’s not really part of the core strategy. So unless you get that management log in, you make somebody responsible, you get it into the spreadsheet, you get that business logic going and say, hey, this is part of our cost-cutting operation, or this is part of how we deliver value to patients or clients.

You’re going to hit a ceiling for how far you can go on individual approaches and passion. Even though I actually love these people. So when we are good, we help the organizations take the jump and put those heroes into a more structured frame where they can then also take on much larger resources from the organization.

[Sheldon Young]
Excellent. I want to talk about your podcast at the very end, but I want to flip the last question a little bit. So if you’re a pharma company right now and you get sustainability, like I say, you’ve got the spreadsheets or you’ve got the PowerPoint deck that says you’re going to do it.

You’ve told the world you’re going to do it, but you haven’t really done it much. What’s something you can do to take action right now? If you were to give some advice, how do they make sustainability real and get the ball moving?

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, great question. So let’s break it down. If you’re in clinical trials or if you’re in manufacturing, it’s most likely going to be cost-cutting that’s going to be the main driver.

So if you’re in clinical trials, you want to link it to virtualizing meetings, to having less drug product waste, fewer non-recruiting sites, clinical sites that don’t recruit patients. If you’re in manufacturing, it’s linking it to all the optimization that you’re doing anyway on throughput or saving energy, water, chemicals. If you’re on commercial and market access, it’s linking it to expanding patient populations by diagnosing earlier, driving up GDMT, guideline directed medical treatment.

So how do you do that? You do it wherever the path of least resistance is, but with the clear goal of getting it into the core strategy. Sometimes you’re lucky and there’s enough of a mandate from the top or there’s a specific reporting commitment you made or another thing where you can do a more top-down approach and say, okay, this is where we’re going to do.

This is how we’re going to measure ourselves. This is how we’re going to get somebody responsible. Often you’re going to have to start from the bottom or sideways.

The good thing is that whichever organization you’re in, I assure you that you have passionate colleagues out there who has done something and who have tons of ideas. If you go down in the organization, there are so many ideas for how to get these things done smarter. Then it’s allowing people to go do those things as well.

There’s enormous innovation potential and energy in sustainability, but the key is that you always have that north star of getting into the core business and getting it into the core strategy and being very explicit on where is the value. Why are we spending time on this in our organization? Who’s responsible?

Because otherwise, it’s fine. You have a reorg literally every 12 to 18 months. One of the big consulting companies, McKinsey or whoever comes in and has sold a reorg or a new vice president comes in.

Unless you build these systems and have very clear answers for why this is important, it’s going to get caught the next time or flattened or rolled out. Then be very, very business case oriented. Never, ever use the argument, it’s the right thing to do.

That’s the last thing you want to say. We saved all this money by not using these chemicals because we found a faster, smarter way to clean our tanks or whatever it was. By the way, that was also really good and our local nature thanks us for it.

But you, good leader, you can put in a million dollar savings in the spreadsheet or whatever that number goes in. Be very focused around whatever the organization is trying to achieve.

[Sheldon Young]
You absolutely couldn’t have said it any better. It has to make business sense or they’re not going to do it. I mean, frankly, unless you’re told to.

If someone comes in and says, you’re doing this, okay, we’ll do it. But most of the time, you have to make business choices. Money isn’t infinite, time isn’t infinite, resources aren’t infinite.

You have to make choices. I do improv comedy, it’s something I do for fun. It’s a yes and.

It’s a yes and. Of course, you’re going to get this and it’s going to be sustainable and you can check off some of those boxes as well. What I would love to see is it weighted in when they’re doing evaluations.

Oh, you have two projects. They both deliver about the same. Oh, but this one also delivers a lot of great sustainability benefit.

So let’s do that one. If I can get someone to think with that mindset, I think I’ve won.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, definitely. And then Steer Towards What’s Material. I mean, if you’re a big pharma factory with thousands of employees, huge resource inflow and outflow.

Sure, plant some trees out in front if that’s what you want to. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not where you should focus your energy. Focus your energy on your core business, what really matters.

And what you have control over.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, definitely. Okay. What a great little tour through the world of pharma sustainability.

I appreciate you doing that. And I know you’re not feeling great today, so I appreciate even more that you’re taking the time to spend with us. Let’s wrap up, though, promoting a little bit the podcast that you do that you had us on.

I’m not sure if the episode aired yet or not, but we’ll be on it talking to you about what we do. But let’s hear about what your podcast is, and who’s it targeting, and what’s the message you’re trying to get out.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, so it’s called the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. You can find it on all platforms, Spotify, Apple, and so on. And it’s just super broad about everything sustainability-wise in healthcare.

So we have everything from doctors to professionals at pharma companies, researchers, academics, suppliers like yourself from Alfa Laval. And it is mainly just a passion project that we just learn so much more from our projects that we can put to good use. So we want to put that knowledge out there to try and create some impact.

It’s a potential way of scaling impact. And then we also just know that there’s a lot of people working with sustainability in pharma and healthcare who can still feel quite isolated. It can be a lonely journey if your organization is not at that point where it’s really picked up.

So I think just also knowing that there are other people out there, and we have almost 100 episodes now, so there’s a really, really good chance you can find something.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, find something that piques your fancy. Very good. That’s great, man.

100 episodes. That’s a nice little milestone. I like that.

You guys need to celebrate.

[Joachim Almdal]
We just started, and then, yeah, here we are.

[Sheldon Young]
I know. Jason and I were just talking. We’re coming up on a year for ours, and so we do like two a month, so we’re about 24 episodes.

But it’s like, yeah, we should celebrate. Our podcast has no footprints. Let’s make some socks or something, right?

You guys got to do something. I don’t know how you do it in a healthcare podcast, but have something fun. Tongue depressor or something like that.

I don’t know.

[Joachim Almdal]
And then, hey, if people want to come on the podcast or have a recommendation or if they want to talk to me, reach out. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, absolutely. You’ll give them a call, and they’ll find you that way. Yeah.

Perfect. Excellent. Anything else?

How do they learn more about your company? Is there a website or something?

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, carepathwayconsulting.com. Perfect. But, yeah, write me if there’s something you find interesting.

And also, even if you’re not a pharma company that has a potential project, we have a super big network just in the pharma and healthcare industry. So if you want to know more about something, there’s a really good chance that we can point you in the right direction towards someone.

[Sheldon Young]
I really appreciate that. I appreciate you saying that sustainability can be lonely. It’s one of the reasons that we wanted to do our podcast as well.

It’s like so many people are out there. We just want to give them access to learn and understand how other people are going through the journey. And I really appreciated spending the time learning about yours today and the sustainability that you’re pushing and driving in pharma.

So good luck, and thanks for being on No Footprints.

[Joachim Almdal]
Yeah, my pleasure. Really enjoyed this time. Thank you, Sheldon.

Thank you, Jason. Thank you.

[Sheldon Young]
Well, there we go. What do you think of that, Jay? I really enjoyed that conversation.

It was good. Again, pharmaceutical and sustainability, it’s such an interesting topic because there’s so many different aspects of what they have to think about, right? It’s not just in the manufacturer, but there’s different types of manufacturing.

There’s different challenges that each type of organization faces, the packaging and the distribution and all the things that go with it.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, I liked that they didn’t limit themselves and they really focused on sustainability optimization throughout the entire value chain.

[Sheldon Young]
Exactly.

[Jason Moreau]
I thought that was really interesting.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, and we got to learn what a medical anthropologist does. I thought that was a good pull.

[Jason Moreau]
That was the first time and still the only time I’ve come across somebody who that’s their job.

[Sheldon Young]
I know, right? It was an interesting learning. I’d never heard of that particular – I mean, you know, medical anthropologists, but mashing them together, what do you know?

Yeah. One of the big takeaways I had from the conversation was where sustainability almost becomes harder the more mature you get. I guess I never really thought about it that way.

I’m like, you think as you mature and you start to learn, you’re like, oh, okay, I know how to focus now. I have a process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You think it would become an easier challenge when in fact – I like the way you put it.

I think it was the Netflix effect.

[Jason Moreau]
The Netflix effect, yeah. I thought that was great.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, I really liked that a lot and the concept of you now have almost – you’ve done so well at uncovering opportunity that you’ve buried yourself in options. I think that’s a really interesting way to think about it because it’s funny. I think about it with the customers and clients that I work with as well.

It’s like when I go there, I have to be conscious of it because I can sit there and make a list that’s 15 things long of different things they could do.

[Jason Moreau]
Right.

[Sheldon Young]
I have to think, do I want to present all these 15 things to them right now or do I want to really, really, really sharpen that pencil down and say, here’s the three things that are most important, right? So I imagine as someone that’s trying to drive sustainability in the organization, you have to really step back and say, okay, what matters the most? Let’s really put our energy behind that.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, and simplify it for people. I thought he was right on point. I think he mentioned it a few times.

Almost his metric or rubric was like, what spreadsheet does this live in? What team does this live with? Because he’s working with very large pharmaceutical organizations.

They like to reorg. Things get moved around and he’s like, it’s not going to survive all of that shuffling, right? Like if this initiative is going to survive, it needs to be aligned with a business priority, a business initiative.

Somebody needs to own it. And I thought that was really, just really sharp, but really a really great way to think about it.

[Sheldon Young]
Definitely a good takeaway. Another takeaway I kind of pulled out was the, and again, this isn’t a surprise, but again, it’s nice to reiterate a little bit is speaking to them in their language and their vernacular. If you’re working with it as an outside person, even on the inside.

I mean, if you go to speak to, if you’re in, let’s say your role is in operations and you’re going to go speak to the maintenance team, what vernacular is maintenance using in that aspect? If you want them to move the needle, you have to talk to it in terms of the things they care about and use their language around it. I’m a sustainability professional.

I’m talking about scope one, scope two, scope three emissions. I can either sit here and define it for them and hope they get it. Or I could say, you’re using a lot of natural gas and we have to cut that down because it’s bad for the environment.

Starting with that, right? Keeping it very simple as, oh, okay. I understand that.

I got to run the boiler less is what you’re saying. That’s our goal. Okay.

I can get behind that. And so, you know, it’s having that, uh, I guess, foresight to think about it before you walk into a conversation and try to move, move mountains, put the story in, in a, in a, in a format that they’re going to, going to relate to.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah. Yeah. He’s like, never lead with that.

And it, it echoed, I think it was, um, our interview with, uh, Scott Boylston, the SCAD professor. He’s like, don’t say the S word. Don’t say sustainability.

Right. That’s where it’s at the end of the conversation after you’ve already talked to them about the things that they care about in the language that they understand. Um, and so, yeah, it was just, it was just interesting that he sort of had that same insight.

Um, one of the, one of the other things I, I picked up from him, which I thought was interesting was, uh, he talked about the fact that like, again, if, if you really care about sustainability and you want this to just be a thing that is part of the company and is a long lasting initiative or objective is that, you know, one heroic person doing it by themselves is not enough. Right. Like it’s just, it’s just never going to survive all of the turbulence in a large organization.

And so. Finding the path of least resistance and getting it into the spreadsheet.

[Sheldon Young]
Right. Like it’s just, it just was.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. And connected to something that’s in the core strategy. Correct.

Get it in a spreadsheet, get it in the list, but it needs to be connected to something that everyone cares about. And so that’s a, that’s the, the, I guess the, the, the art and science of driving sustainability and making it real. I mean, pharma can be really complicated.

Right. And so it is really kind of sitting down, peeling back the onion a little bit and saying, okay, look, what do you, what do you care about as an organization? And then how do we draw the line, connect the dots?

So it’s very clear that if you make, if you improve your sustainability and make it a more sustainable process, you are going to also move these metrics and you’re going to, this is what you said you care about. This is what you’re moving here. It’s going to give you a more sustainable outcome and it’s going to drive these things that you care about.

Again, it’s so simple when you say it. But then as you build this roadmap, as you build it out, you really have to focus on, on those things that don’t lose sight of that. Cause if you lose sight of that, you become noise.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
And so it was really good advice. And I think it’s so important when you’re trying to, to, to move the needle on sustainability and taking that path of least resistance, tie it to the strategy. Right.

[Jason Moreau]
I think he had a really interesting perspective too, when he said that sustainability, if you hold that title, you’re more of a coach or enabler versus the player or the fixer. And I thought that was a really interesting perspective where, and the way that I understood that was there’s already good things happening. And, and I think it was again, sort of like a callback to one of our earlier interviews, I think it was Ron Holmes with Haskell.

Oh, right. Where he, you know, he started and he’s like, you know, there was already a lot of good things happening. I just kind of came in as the sustainability guy.

And now I was, you know, I could collect them. I could shine a light on them. I, you know, I could have the conversations with the people and, and be an advocate and a champion.

But like, it’s not like he comes in and does all of the state sustainability things. He’s, he’s kind of coaching and orchestrating and you know, that, so that’s, that’s how I understood Joachim’s like comment was kind of the same thing where there’s good things happening, find those threads and then just kind of like be the orchestrator. Like, don’t feel like it’s all on you to do it.

So I just, I don’t know. I thought that was an interesting perspective.

[Sheldon Young]
It is. And it ties back to what you said earlier around the hero. Right.

It’s like, I think there’s a, it’s almost a, it’s not a fatal flaw. It’s not the right word is I think we run a risk. People become so passionate about sustainability and they want to, they want to make a difference and they see themselves as the, the one who sees it.

Right. It’s their, it’s their kind of calling in their, in their role to figure it out and they see it all. And then they want it, they tend to want to put it all on their back and be the person that also has to do it all.

Right. And it’s, it’s noble, but it’s not going to work well. It’s going to, it’s going to end up causing challenges because you can’t be both.

I love what you just said. You’re basically the, the conductor and you’re kind of, you’re pulling all the threads together. You’re, you’re weaving the tapestry, but you still rely on other people to help finish the garment.

Right. You can’t do it all. And, uh, I think, you know, particularly his role of being a consultant, stepping in, being the person that can see it from a 10,000 foot view and then guiding them through the process of owning it, showing them the connections of like, here’s how you make it valid.

Here’s how you make it valuable. Here’s how you make it real. Then you organization have to execute and it’ll show up in your metrics.

It’ll show up in the things you care about. Here’s the path. And that’s what, again, his name, his company’s career pathways, uh, pathways.

Um, it makes sense.

[Jason Moreau]
It makes sense. Yeah. But it was, it’s smart just from a psychological standpoint too, because he framed it as you can show people that they’re already doing these things.

Right. It’s, it’s much harder to convince somebody to do something if they feel like they’re starting from zero or starting from a standstill. If you basically can just point out like, look, here are all the areas where you’re already doing this.

We’re just organizing it differently. We’re going to measure it, you know, against the state. Like not only did you reduce your water usage, but oh, by the end, you know, you’re there’s less chemicals going down the drain, which is, you know, a million dollars in the positive to your bottom line.

But, oh, it’s also good for your, you know, ESG goals. Right. Like, so, so like it’s just the way he framed things I thought was just super, super smart just from an engagement standpoint and getting people like excited about the work because they’re already doing it.

Right. Like, so it was just putting a different label on it. Absolutely.

[Sheldon Young]
Absolutely. Good stuff. All right.

Well, certainly, folks, connect with, with Joachim. Find him on the, on LinkedIn and all the fun places. He also has a podcast.

It’s called Sustainability in Healthcare. Sorry. The Sustainable Healthcare Podcast.

I read it wrong. The Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Joachim Almdal.

Find that. Listen to it. You’ll learn more insight from him and his guests as well if you’re interested in sustainability in the pharmaceutical space.

And with that, Jason, it is time for us to depart. If you like this podcast, please follow, like, subscribe, tell your friends, neighbors, babies. We don’t care.

Tell everyone. And share it with your network. We love more listeners.

We’ve got some great guests coming up. I’m very excited. You and I have both been busy in the pipeline here, just filling that thing with some really fun guests and encourage you to follow the podcast and listen for more coming up.

This stuff really matters to the success of this little show. So make sure to also check out our website, nofootprintspodcast.com. If you have ideas, send us an email, nofootprints.podcast@alfalaval.com.

With that, I bid you adieu, my friend. See you next time. Our guests come from many industries and companies as we’re talking about how the world makes sustainability real.

Our company, Alfa Laval, is a global supplier of process solutions, so it’s very possible that the organizations our guests are with may use Alfa Laval or even our competitors’ products. This does not mean that we, the hosts, or Alfa Laval are endorsing any of the company’s guests or the specific ideas that we discuss.