Sustainability in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Transcript

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

Jason Moreau
And I’m Jason Moreau.

Sheldon Young
We’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts and people behind making sustainability real.

Here we go again, Jason, it’s time to play. It’s time.

Jason Moreau
It’s time to talk to the people, all of the people, people, massive, massive hordes of people, the hordes who listen to this show, exactly.

Sheldon Young
So if you’re not listening, uh, you know, you’re just not in, but what are you doing? You wouldn’t know you weren’t listening because you’re not listening. So for those of you that are listening, tell your friends, tell everyone you know about the podcast because they need to be listening or else they’re not cool like you.

That’s how it is.

Jason Moreau
Right. Because at some point you want to be able to be like, I was listening to No Footprints back when it was cool.

Sheldon Young
Right. I was one of the OG No Footprints fans. I knew Sheldon when he was just starting out, right?

I knew Sheldon when he had hair. Oh, oh, you’re mean, you’re mean. You and your flowing locks, you’re flowing silver, silver locks.

I want to wear a hat now on you. You’ve got me self-conscious, Jason. Oh, here it goes.

I put a hat on now.

Jason Moreau
I like it.

Sheldon Young
This is my official No Footprints hat of the day. I can do a different one every time if you want. I don’t think it feels weird.

Okay. Yeah. All right.

So anyway, today let’s start with what’s on our mind. So what do you got for me, Jason? What’s your story?

Jason Moreau
My story is one of scientific inquiry and achievements. Basically a team, this team is actually out of Japan. They were working on a biodegradable bioplastic, which might be more.

So based out of cellulose plant material, they had developed their first version worked. So like a plastic bag substitute, like you would have for like a grocery bag dissolved in saltwater. So it was, which was really nice because I guess it has to be saltwater.

Well, they were specifically working on the problem of microplastics in the ocean because what they found was a lot of the current or the baseline cellulose materials were still like hanging around and weren’t breaking down in the sea. So yeah, their specific aim was saltwater. And they, the way they described it was like the layers of cellulose.

They had like a little salt bridge between them and it dissolves, like it dissolves in saltwater. It’s pretty wild to watch the video. The problem was, is their original version was very brittle and fragile, did not exhibit the properties that we are used to like a, like a regular, like a plastic bag.

And so it’s kind of like what we always talk about where it’s like they, instead of like, Oh, I guess this is good enough. They realized that like, well, the market is already used to a plastic bag having certain properties needing, right. And it’s like, you need to at least meet that threshold.

If you ever hope to succeed with some sort of sustainable alternative to what you want people to switch behavior. Right. Exactly.

And they did it. They, they had a breakthrough. They tested a lot of different materials.

Um, I forget what the specific material was. I won’t even pretend to understand it, but basically they add this element and they can dial up or dial down the elasticity of this cellulose based plastic alternative now to where it can literally be like 130% of the stretch of a standard plastic bag while still maintaining, um, complete, you know, dissolvability in saltwater. So I just, I really love those stories because I think, I mean, we, we focus on sustainability in all kinds of different areas, but I guess I’m just sort of a science geek at heart where it’s like, I love the people doing the pure research and just the hard work of like, is it this compound that does it?

Nope. Try the next compound, try the next compound. Right.

And then having these really cool breakthroughs where it’s like, Oh, this is this material is I think almost production ready, um, and you know, it could make a really big impact. So I just really liked the story and the video of the bag dissolving is like super cool. I’ll send it.

Sheldon Young
Oh yeah. Send it to me. I want to see that again.

I’m, I’m very fascinated that it works. It’s only saltwater. I’m like, well, a bag that dissolves in regular water, that won’t work because like, you know, if it rains or they’re carrying your groceries, you can’t have something that breaks that has to be regular water.

Jason Moreau
It’s totally fine because you can, you can coat the cellulose with a, like a water permeable like film where no, it’s not going to break in the rain, but put it in the ocean and it’s gone.

Sheldon Young
Huh? Slick. I like it.

That’s a fun one. Jason. I like fun ones.

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

So what I found, um, at the beginning of the new year, uh, I remember this. So about, uh, about a year ago, uh, uh, a woman, uh, named, uh, I got her name here somewhere. Where is it?

Uh, Anastasia Kuskova, uh, from, and her company is, I think it’d be serious as I think it’s S I R I U S, but I’m not, don’t quote me on that, uh, be, be serious. Uh, and they put, I remember this post vividly cause I remember reading it. It was, uh, an article was like sustainability is dead, long live sustainability or something like that.

And it was one of those ones, you know, where you started to see some of that pushback around sustainability and things like that. And with this article, they put out a curve, sustainability maturity curve, and it looks like almost any product curve that you would recognize as a marketer. Right.

Uh, and you know, some of the things on this curve, you know, the first SBTI is that it’s at the beginning of the curve, right. Annual reports with ESG and then plastic free and net zeros by 2030s. Right.

And then there’s a downslope on the right. This is time. And she, they call this the trough of disillusionment and that was attack on D I know a year ago they did a prediction of where we would be like a year from now.

And, and, you know, it kind of pointed on a curve a little farther where it hit that trough of disillusionment and started to rebound into a, what was called a slope of enlightenment and kind of plateau of productivity. And I liked the concept a lot because it is, we are creatures of pattern and habit with almost anything that’s new, any initiative that comes out, sustainability, same thing, roaring excitement, no idea how to accomplish it. Just you know, a, a, a burning platform kind of need, uh, tons of money and, and, and activity, but no idea how to drive impact.

Uh, and people just kind of shoot in lots of different directions to figure out what’s going to hit. Um, that’s again, you can’t get around that. No one, no one hits it the first time.

And uh, sure enough, it was the, where’s the ROI carbon offsets, scandals, ESG budget, just slash CEO has big promises at Davos sustainability team grows by 300%. And then at the bottom, it’s like ESG and DEI backlash. Not seeing that at all.

Are we right? And so then this was 11 months ago when they put this thing out and I’m like, yeah, that all happened. It all happened.

And they pointed on the curve kind of where we are, the scaling back of targets. Yup. Not surprising now because again, and again, it’s, there’s no, there’s nothing we’ve talked about this before, right?

There’s nothing bad about that. It is a, a realization that you had to set a goal somewhere and if you didn’t, nothing would happen. Right.

As long as there were, as long as you didn’t set the goal off to the side and didn’t do anything towards it, that’s a fail. But making efforts and trying and not getting the goal should be okay. You just have to realize, okay, we have to reflect, reset, realign, but then still have goals and keep going.

And I think that’s where we are. I feel largely that’s where we are. Yes, we’ve had some people that are trying to, you know, because of the, the sentiment and the, and the environment are saying, well, we’re just going to pull back on some of this stuff.

Okay, fine. That’s great. But a lot, most companies realize that sustainability is good business if you do it right.

And are resetting and reestablishing. And we hopefully will start to see some of those smaller, more focused initiatives, realistic goals and expectations, achieving those targets and then looking, you know, the next question is how are we going to get there? What does that look like?

But we are starting to see a lot more pen to paper of real tangible goals and real tangible impacts and efforts to get to those goals instead of just throwing the big audacious hairy goal out there and hoping, right? Hope’s not a strategy. Hope is, is a, a motivator, right?

Now we’re in the, okay, we understand what the real situation is. Let’s real, realign, let’s remotivate. Now let’s really go after some tangible things and the people I’ve seen being put in place and that are joining the sustainability ranks of these companies now are ones that are doers and they’re ones that are more, I’m going to call analytical around getting there.

We’re starting to put real numbers behind stuff. We’re starting to see more and more put these in real annual reports. If you’re a European company, as you know, it’s a real thing you have to report on and be honest about, or you can get in trouble, frankly.

It’s actually just like being part of your annual report from a financial point of view. So, uh, definitely, I guess I would say predicted it. Now, again, you could argue some of these things are where you could have seen coming a mile away, but some of them are pretty good curve and the things that went in, went in where they hit.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. I think, I think you’re right that anytime you start something, um, especially if it’s new or, or maybe a bit audacious, you kind of go through the stages of the first stage is literally, you don’t know what you don’t know. Um, and it’s the, what is it unconscious and competent, right?

And then I love that you move into conscious incompetent where it’s like, Hmm, we’ve learned a lot about what we don’t know. And I think now, like when you’re moving back up the trough, you’re moving into conscious competency, right? You’re realigning, you’re resizing what is possible.

Um, and yeah, I, I, I just think that’s the natural progression of, of how we grow and get better. But, uh, yeah, it is, it is pretty uncanny how well it predicted some of the things, uh, you know, 12 months prior.

Sheldon Young
Right, right. For sure. For sure.

I think the only thing she said she was a little off on was, uh, it’s slower coming up that slope of, um, uh, enlightenment, uh, than, than they predicted. So that’s okay. And I think that you, again, it’s okay.

Reset the, reset the expectation a little bit. All right. So what are we going to talk about today besides this?

This is a great, this is a great, we could have gone on this for the rest of the episode probably. I know. Right.

But, uh, we’re going to talk about pharmaceuticals a little bit. So the pharma industry, uh, kind of kick off a little bit and talk about, um, uh, you know, ways that were the, some of the top standard issues that they have, uh, especially on water energy, right. What the industry is already doing.

And then maybe about what still needs to happen. Uh, look, I’m full, full disclosure here. I’m not a super pharma expert.

I, we, we have Laval does plenty of work in pharma where, uh, you know, our, our division just got renamed. We’re a food and pharma, right. Uh, and, uh, you know, I spent some time in it and I understand parts of it, but I’m sure there were people listening that are pharma experts.

I would love to talk to you and learn more myself. So please, uh, no footprints dot podcast at alpha level.com. Send us a note.

If you have insights you’d like to add after listening to the episode. So, uh, but anyways, we’re going to dive into it a little bit, Jason, uh, and I’m just going to kind of go here and, uh, you know, I want you to jump in and talk and ask questions and let’s see where we go with this thing.

Jason Moreau
All right. I’ll just say off the bat before you get rolling, I am excited about this topic because yes, I don’t think it’s one we’ve really touched on yet on the podcast, but all of the trends for pharmaceutical are very, very close. Like when you look at all of the predictions for 2030, 2050, they’re very similar to what we have talked about for food.

Um, you have a population that is predicted to grow and you also have a population where, uh, the percentage of older people in the population is also going to grow. So people, more people living longer. Um, obviously that means we need to figure out how do we sustainably feed all of these people.

But ergo, that also means how do we sustainably keep all of these people healthier, longer, longer. Right. And so, yeah, it’s the exact same trend line.

Um, so I think, I think it’s really interesting and to me that’s, that’s, that’s why food and pharma are kind of tied together for us.

Sheldon Young
Absolutely. Absolutely. Jason.

Great, great insight there. And thinking around that, I think, um, you know, and plus again, something else that comes with pharma is costs are high, right? It’s very expensive to develop drugs and then manufacture them because of all the things that go with it, the regulations and all that stuff.

And, uh, you know, and that’s basically, that actually rolls kind of in the first topic around what are some of the challenges we see in, in, in pharma from a sustainability point of view? Well, one, it is a very energy and carbon intensive industry for lots of reasons. Um, you know, I, I guess, you know, just to, to put it bluntly, you know, on a dollar per dollar revenue, the amount of CO2 equivalent that’s generated is higher, 50 to 60%.

So then the automotive sector, that’s a statistic I pulled, you know, out of one of the reports I can give site site resources that people have questions around and I’ll get, let’s even say even if it’s half that, it’s still, it’s a lot more intensive per dollar revenue to produce from a carbon intensity point of point of view. Why? Well, because number one, it’s highly regulated.

Uh, you are, again, you’re not making t-shirts or you’re making drugs that go in people’s bodies. Um, in the environment in which you need to make a lot of these, and without getting into the nuts and bolts of pharmaceuticals, you have something called API, it’s an active pharmaceutical ingredients. That’s more like a chemical plant.

That’s not really as clean, uh, or has the same cleanliness requirements as say, uh, the actual drug manufacturing and the final finishing that stuff that goes in your body. That stuff, when you start getting that, that, that part of the value chain is what we’re talking about. Mostly here, ultra clean, lots of filtration, lots of cleaning and cleaning requires lots of heat, steam, chemicals, water.

All that stuff is a heavily resource intensive, particularly in the carbon space and water space, uh, kind of environment. Um, there are global supply chains. You have to move this stuff all over the world, right?

And so, um, there’s lots of packaging and that packaging has to be sterilized packaging. Uh, it’s a plastic, plastic intensive. Typically you’re, you’re putting, using a lot of plastics when you’re packaging pharmaceuticals and then you’re shipping it to different continents for, you know, and so that’s intensive.

And so you add it all up, big carbon intensity, water, obviously I mentioned already with the cleaning, uh, it uses, uh, typically a very purified water and that those purification steps, uh, are, are very intensive as well as something called water for injection, which is exactly what it sounds like has to be clean enough to inject in someone’s body. It’s intensive to make that. So requires a lot of resources to do that.

Again, I mentioned the cleaning steam, a lot of steam is utilized. So you’re using energy to make that steam and then you have to cool a lot of things back down. So you’re, you’re losing a lot of energy in that process as well.

So it’s a pretty extensive, uh, uh, process for that perspective in terms of water. Um, some of the sustainability things that go with that big volumes, a large scale site is like hundreds from water perspective, hundreds of thousands of gallons a day for production and cleaning. It’s a lot.

It’s not small, uh, potatoes when it comes to, uh, it’s water use, uh, those, the, the treatment that’s needed to, you know, it uses a lot of filtration and ozone membrane filtration, which is something we do at Alpha Laval, uh, and then the wastewater that has to be treated often has contaminants in it because you’re, you’re using it to make these drugs and you don’t want to put, you know, try to avoid it anytime you can putting these, these, uh, uh, pharmaceutical drugs back in the environment.

So you have to have pretty extensive wastewater treatment to neutralize that. So the resources that are needed for that are also pretty intensive. Um, so it’s, it’s pretty, from an impact perspective, uh, I guess that he mentioned like HVAC, it’s a huge amount of energy because you have to keep those clean rooms, circling the air through those things multiple, multiple times, much more than you would a normal room or even a hospital room.

In some cases you’re recirculating. They have to take lots of fan power, lots of filtration and all that stuff. So highly intensive.

And so that’s kind of the one when you think about impact in the pharmaceutical industry, there are a lot of uphill battles to fight, uh, but also that means a lot of opportunity, right?

Jason Moreau
Well, there’s a whole, the, uh, not for, I guess, all materials, but a decent chunk, um, maybe in the biopharma space, there’s a whole cold chain logistics, right? Like it’s, it’s not just the manufacturing site that needs to sort of maintain certain, you know, temps and standards, but to even, uh, ship the, you know, the vaccines or whatever the material is like, all of those are like chilled. And so that’s, that’s HVAC and energy as well.

Yeah.

Sheldon Young
Jason is such a great point. Um, you know, I didn’t even mention, I didn’t even mention that one. Thank you for bringing it up.

No, but I used to work at a pharma company for a little while and, uh, the, the, uh, the drug that we ship to people, um, we packed, um, it was a, you know, a small device that had a, had a drug in it. Um, but it needed to, you know, we, we determined that for it to be ultimately the safest way to ship it, it had to be shipped with cold packs.

Jason Moreau
Yep.

Sheldon Young
So you had a box, this tiny device in it, you then had cold pack, at least two ice packs around it to keep it cold. So every time you shipped it out, it had that packaging, which was an insulated kind of packaging. It had ice packs, two ice packs and a shipment to a customer to wherever they were in the country.

Jason Moreau
Right.

Sheldon Young
It all came out of one place.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. So that’s just extra weight, right? So extra fuel, but even just, I’m sure the warehouse, you know, to like score all of these things.

Sheldon Young
Yeah.

Jason Moreau
Certain temperatures and the energy required to maintain. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s wild to think about.

Sheldon Young
Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I think, I don’t, I don’t think the drug was stored cold, cold.

It had to be, I guess, a room temperature environment.

Jason Moreau
Okay.

Sheldon Young
Uh, but the cold packs always, they had to have a freezer kind of thing for the cold packs.

Jason Moreau
Okay.

Sheldon Young
So it’s still energy. Yeah. Right.

Uh, big, big impact there. So what can you do about it? What’s some of the technologies and stuff?

How are they, how are they addressing it? Well, again, technology is often the answer. Plus you, part of it is looking, understand the problem.

So part of it is a lot of companies are adding more sustainability people to kind of analyze these problems, dive in, understand how those impacts are happening. And can you, can you do something with your process to change it? Can you add technology solutions that utilize less water or energy, right?

Especially things that, that lower the cleaning needs. Like again, this is, I don’t like to talk about our technologies, but does some stuff like for example, a tank cleaner, uh, they can cut down the water 60, 70%. Okay.

Well, you do something like that for something that’s so resource intensive. There you go. You now have something that is made a big impact in the, in the sustainability of that, of that production process.

Uh, something called single use. I’m not getting too crazy about that in terms of a long discussion, but you have a couple of ways you can make certain, certain drugs, uh, oftentimes they’re done in, in, uh, you know, stainless steel equipment. That’s a very, a lot of, if you’re building a pharmaceutical plant, oftentimes the, we made a lot of stainless steel, very, very clean stainless steel.

What we are seeing for certain drugs now, something called single use systems where pretty much everything that the drug touches is disposable. For example, I mean, again, I’ll use an alpha example because we have, when we do a single use centrifuge, centrifuges are used to separate parts of the drug out, um, from, uh, the non-usable components. Uh, they, we make us a, a single use one.

Now while, wow, geez, how was that more sustainable? Might be the question that pops in your head. Well, when you look at it from a total impact perspective, you say, wow, in the stainless steel system, I have to do those massive cleaning processes every time, every batch, lots of energy, tons of chemicals, lots of water, lots of time, all those things, you add those things up and you do the analysis versus the single use components that you were now using once collecting your product and disposing of it’s a lower impact, believe it or not.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Jason Moreau
Significantly lower. Yeah. I’m glad you went into that.

Cause that, that’s one of the ones that is counterintuitive. Like it’s very counterintuitive. Because I think in, you know, normal everyday life, I think there’s just this sort of like in most people’s brains, single use is not the most bad word, right?

Like look at cutlery, look at right. Like anything we encounter in like normal life is just like, oh, single use. It’s like, yeah, of course that’s not as sustainable.

So it’s, it’s wild that the math inverts when you’re talking about the scale and the requirements to make something pharmaceutical grade.

Sheldon Young
Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, and I’m not going to say every case is different, right?

Jason Moreau
Right.

Sheldon Young
But another advantage of single use, those processes, they’re often, you can often package them up and have them be mobile. So if you have a, if you have a need for, let’s say you want to produce a drug in a different country or something, you can obviously send a whole system there. It says shipping drugs over that you can slip a small single use system over there and have a small production facility.

That’s mobile, right? It’s a really interesting concept. I mean, it’s one that’s still in that evolution phase, you know, and again, it’ll make more sense as time goes on, but it’s really interesting to look at and understand.

Okay. Let’s let’s talk energy. We talked about a little bit, but I mentioned HVAC sterilization, cooling, cooling, cold chains.

I had that on this list down in energy here. So thank you for bringing that up earlier. And then the greenhouse gas emissions and stuff, if you’re still using electricity from a fossil based type of thing.

So all those things kind of added up can be pretty significant. So what are they doing now? You start to see definitely more focus on things like HVAC, right?

They’re looking at energy efficient technologies. You know, they’re also monitoring it a little better, really understanding and keeping close. Tabs on the like, say, the temperatures and humidity requirements in these rooms.

They’re really dialing them in and they’re creating higher, more sophisticated systems that really, really tailor make these things. Oftentimes you would just say, well, let’s just oversize the thing and let it make sure it’s clean, right? Really intensive in terms of energy.

So actually taking the time to have a system that delivers exactly what you need is much more efficient, much more lower impact. And so you’re seeing a lot more of that happening, right? Setting and actually pushing towards renewable energy targets.

I know that sounds like a simple one, but you start to see on-site solar panels on roofs and parking lots. People are actually putting them over parking lots. Geez, that’s nice.

It also shades cars. What a concept, right? Though I guess you could argue trees are nice too.

So I guess either one of those I’ll find acceptable, right? But you start seeing those efficiency gains really quickly. Like that HVAC stuff I talked about, that can be 20 to 40%.

And HVAC is the biggest energy user in many facilities, just to be very clear on that, right? It can be the biggest because of the amount that has to happen. And so all that stuff there, looking at contracts to buy renewable energy from your utility customer, I think you’re starting to see more of that.

I also know that a lot of pharmaceuticals are looking at their vendors as well and say, hey, what kind of impact are you making on the things you supply us? And pushing back and making sure that their downstream and upstream impacts are minimized as well.

Jason Moreau
That’s the scope three?

Sheldon Young
Yes, correct.

Jason Moreau
Okay.

Sheldon Young
Correct. Yep. Look at you learning, Jason.

I love it.

Jason Moreau
Trying and practicing. You are, you’re doing great. Got to reinforce it, got to repetition.

Yeah.

Sheldon Young
Right, right. So what still needs to be done on energy and climate? Again, more that decarbonization.

When they’re looking at processes and designing these new facilities, really making that a front of mind kind of thing is one of the key decision makers in the design selection, right? Incorporating that technology, realize in some cases might be a little more expensive to do that out of the gate. But I will almost guarantee it when you start looking at the impact it has on your bottom line, the energy costs, the water costs, the treatment costs, all of that stuff, doing it in advance and doing it right the first time will give you a return on investment that’s usually pretty attractive.

Jason Moreau
I’m just curious. I might do some research on this if there’s any, because when we were talking about building design and stuff like that. Sure.

Something as simple as the orientation of the building can have a huge impact, right? Is it east, west, or north, south on your energy needs, sun coming in through certain it’s amazing. It feels like the smallest thing, and yet once you set the footprint of that building and how it’s oriented, you have all of these really great knock-on effects.

I’m just curious if there’s architectural and engineers who are designing for that specifically. I might have to dig into that.

Sheldon Young
I’d like to. Reporting next time, Jason will come back. Maybe that’ll be your story next time we record.

I hope so. Yeah. You dove in a little bit.

Yeah, and then, okay, so that’s beyond water and energy, kind of the bigger Stanley picture. Again, I mentioned a lot of times, particularly in that front-end production of pharmaceuticals, chemicals, solvents, all that stuff. Even in all the cleaning we talked about, there’s certain chemicals and solvents that have to be used, right?

Take a look. Are there other alternatives that are more sustainable, ones that will still give you the same result you want? Now, again, I know a lot of times pharmaceuticals are very specific, right?

Hey, look, we can’t mess with this. Absolutely right. You cannot mess with the safety.

You cannot mess with, frankly, you can’t mess with costs too much because that gets passed on to consumers, all that stuff, right? But looking at green chemistry alternatives help address some of these things, right? And they are, they do exist.

Waste in general, I mentioned things like packaging waste, expired product, another waste is certainly overproducing or stuff that isn’t going to be able to get to its destination in time is a waste. That’s just lost impact. Things like lab waste and just the production waste.

What are you doing with it? Are you recycling, upcycling? And there’s an interesting project, a facility down in the Carolinas, they had a bunch of plastic waste and they were just basically either burning it or shipping off, forget what it was.

There was a company, gosh, I wish I remember the name. Maybe I’ll research this one. I have it somewhere.

They would take that medical waste, turn it into like furniture. What? Yeah.

Yeah. They took the plastic, upcycled it and made like, I think like picnic tables or something like that. They were upcycling stuff like that.

I’m sure there were rules around the type of plastic. You can’t have a whole bunch of mixed plastic or work, but they were able to work with this company to take their waste and make furniture from it. I’ll have to look that up next time.

There were alternatives out there with a little bit of thinking. Maybe there’s things you can do with this stuff, right? And then don’t forget, I’ve talked about these before, the social sustainability, access to meds, fair pricing, ethical trials and safe working conditions.

All those things are part of the sustainability slash ESG agenda and should be things that the industry continues to push on. And it’s a very difficult industry for a lot of ways because it’s so much regulatory around it. There’s a lot of costs.

There’s a lot of factors that go into these things. But I think we continue to see more and more focus on making impact less of operations. So what’s the road ahead look like?

I think we hope we continue to see ambitious targets around carbon and reducing impact, cutting down on the water and both from the usage as well as the discharge of wastewater and making sure that it’s as minimal impact as possible. Zero waste to landfill operations. You continue to see things like that, ambitious targets around those things.

Integrated decision making. As I talked about, when you build these new facilities, we’ve got a couple coming here in Virginia near us. And I’m hoping, to your point, as we talked about, they’re putting clear criteria in place to think about the impact these facilities are going to have.

And they’re putting technology and design thinking into these facilities that lowers the impact of them and produces a more sustainable product and reduces the impact to their communities, frankly. I hope we start to see more and more of that. Sustainability is part of R&D.

Again, this is one of those, how do you change the thinking? R&D of drugs is a very specific kind of process. They’re very focused on the R&D things they need to do.

Are they also R&Ding around making them more sustainable? It’s a mindset shift, I think. But I think there’s an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to think of their processes and just add a few steps to ask more questions around it.

Hey, that’s great, but is there a smarter way of doing it? And then, again, collaboration and standards. I think there’s something there that we’re here to help, I guess.

There are so many resources out there. We work in the pharmaceutical industry. I work in sustainability.

I love working with people in the pharmaceutical industry around improving the sustainability. And there are many more people out there in different industries and different aspects of pharmaceutical that are there as well. I’d like to see more like I see in the dairy industry, where there’s these alliances.

There’s the Dairy Sustainability Alliance. Again, I need to research it a little bit more as I work more in this industry. Is there a pharmaceutical sustainability alliance?

And is it made up of different people from different parts of the value chain to work together? I think there’s an opportunity there if that doesn’t exist yet. Final thoughts, Jason.

Let’s get to final thoughts. Thank you for letting me go on my little pharmaceutical train there and talk about sustainability. I think it’s a fun topic.

I love this industry because it delivers so much value, but there’s also so much opportunity. You did a speed run there.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, you covered a lot of ground. Was it too fast? It wasn’t too fast.

It was a lot to take in and think about. I’m kind of excited. I mean, I think of it as the trailer for maybe future episodes that might be coming down the pipeline in terms of digging in deeper into some of the different sections that you outlined.

Clearly, if somebody is listening and they have a great sustainability story to share, whether it’s logistics or whether it’s water use or just even building design, it would be amazing to chat and tell that story. But no, I think it was a pretty amazing overview. There was a lot there that I hadn’t thought about before.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, and I think I forgot to mention this part of sustainability. One of the reasons it’s important to the industry, it’s the industry’s customers think it’s important. Yeah.

The hospitals and the people that are purchasing these drugs, they think sustainability is important, and they have an expectation that the producers of pharmaceuticals are doing it more sustainably.

Jason Moreau
Well, because it’s their scope three.

Sheldon Young
It is.

Jason Moreau
Crazy thing about scope three for me is it’s like you’re always somebody else’s scope three, right? So you’re taking care of your stuff, but then the impacts up and down the supply chain and this web that we call like modern infrastructure is really interesting when you start to think about it that way.

Sheldon Young
Right, right, for sure. OK, so final thoughts. What I want to do for final thoughts is give people some I want to take a few different angles here and give people some thought things, some thought questions or questions that they could ask if they’re interested in the impact or trying to make a dent in the impact of sustainability in pharmaceuticals.

So let’s start with for people that work in the pharmaceutical industry, some simple questions. Again, some of these are going to sound super simple, but, hey, I’m going to ask them anyways. Where does that water come from?

Mm hmm. Do we reuse that water as much as possible or is it just going down the drain? Yeah.

How do we treat it before we do discharge it to a sewer or to a municipality? There’s your water question, right? And again, this next is pretty simple.

What are our biggest energy users on site? What are the things that use energy? Energy is a multiple thing.

That’s just electricity. Electricity is one. What’s using steam?

Or there’s usually a boiler. A boiler is making steam. Where is that steam going?

And how is it being utilized? And are there better ways to track it, understand it, and then ask yourself, if I didn’t have steam, what would I do? And then that maybe will start to develop some possibilities.

OK, so concrete some actions you might consider start a I’m going to call it again. That collaboration thing we talked about, Jason, like joining or starting a green team or a sustainability or impact team at your pharmaceutical company, right? So just energy audits or walkthroughs of your facility through use your partners, your supplier partners.

They’re almost always willing to do that. At least good ones will want to step in and help you with that. Smarter shutdown and startup routines, cleaning routines, right?

More efficient equipment. Do you have equipment that’s 30 years old? What would changing it?

I know she’s sometimes like, oh, she’s a new equipment X amount of dollars. But think of understand the impact of that newer equipment. Is it going to cut your costs in half as well?

Maybe. And what does that mean to you? Bring sustainability into discussions.

Whenever you’re talking about anything new, an upgrade or a process change, bring up sustainability or whatever word you want to use optimization, energy savings. Bring it into the conversation and saying, how are we thinking of this? Is there a smarter way to do this that will save us money and energy and resources?

There almost always is. If the older, if you have older equipment, you’re making changes almost a better way every time. If your listeners just outside a farmer, if you’re a patient, there are things like take back machines or left for leftover medicine.

Instead of, again, I don’t do this. Some people do. But if you have old drugs, flushing them down the toilet or tossing in the trash, there might be a take back program.

That you can take your unused or expired drugs to so that they’ll be disposed of in a way that doesn’t impact the environment. If you’re a citizen or investor, there are policies out there that companies that make their ask them to be transparent and ambitious on climate and water. Ask simple accountability questions.

Do you report on your water and emissions use? Do you have targets? Hold, hold, hold.

Let’s hold the industry accountable. In any case, this is for any company, frankly, right? We should all hold ourselves accountable and be comfortable talking about it, even if it’s good, bad, or different.

So I guess from that perspective, that’s kind of all I had, Jason. I think, you know, I want to do more in this industry as the year goes on. I think I’ve got at least one guest that does sustainability consulting in this industry that we’re going to talk to at some point.

I think that’ll be a fun one. Yeah. So if you’re listening to this and I invite you to, if you have stories or people that are working around sustainability in the pharmaceutical, biotech industry, or healthcare even, reach out.

Let me know. Let us know. We’ll gladly have a good conversation.

If there’s a topic, Jason’s losing his microphone right now. I got really excited. I got really excited.

Hands are flying. But anyways, we want to talk to you. And I think it would be interesting to have more.

And again, if you want to reach out to us, you can do that. There’s lots of ways. Well, there’s really one major way.

It’s an email. nofootprints.podcast@alfalaval.com. A-L-F-A-L-A-V-A-L.

You can also reach Jason and I on LinkedIn. We’re pretty active on there. You can find us, Sheldon Young, Jason Moreau.

It’s in the show notes if you want to find our names. And we also have a lot of fun on LinkedIn with content. And so it’s a worthy follow, I think.

I think we’re a worthy follow. And yeah, send us your ideas. We’ve got a great guest as well.

So with that, Jason, thank you for letting me talk a lot.

Jason Moreau
Thank you for saying good things. I always learn a lot.

Sheldon Young
Oh, you’re such a good friend. We need to have a couple more. We need like a Jason heavy episode.

I want one that maybe it’s…

Jason Moreau
I think we’re cooking up one actually. Oh, yeah, that’s right. We got one coming.

Sheldon Young
Oh, excellent.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, I think you know which one I’m probably referring to. That one will probably be very Jason centric.

Sheldon Young
Oh, I love it.

Jason Moreau
Apologies in advance.

Sheldon Young
No, no, I’m excited about this. And I think the listeners are as well because I yap a lot. So it’s all good.

All right, friends. Thank you for joining us on No Footprints.

Jason Moreau
Bye everyone.

Sheldon Young
Bye-bye.

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.