Minimising consumption and environmental impacts

Our R&D and manufacturing activities are largely based on chemical synthesis, meaning we use considerable amounts of organic solvents and energy, generating waste and air emissions. We manage these environmental impacts through our integrated Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) approach. We define our overall priorities annually in our HSE Strategy and transform them into measurable targets and actions.

We have applied green chemistry principles broadly for many years in Lundbeck, yielding several circular savings in our Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) production, improving both yield and quality, and decreasing the use of reagents, catalysts, and solvents.

We deploy the best available technologies when designing processes, technical utilities and facilities, to continuously improve our manufacturing processes. Where possible we use solvents with lower environmental impact and have increased our capabilities to recycle organic solvents in chemical production. This has allowed us to eliminate the need for thousands of tons of virgin materials and continue to save resources for production, transportation and waste management.

We partner with universities to develop new working methods. For instance, by introducing continuous processing. Here the product is produced in a continuous flow in significantly smaller equipment than used in traditional batch processes where large reactors are filled, emptied and cleaned between each process step. This offers great benefits in raw material and energy usage.

By combining continuous production with recycling principles, we can create a circular economy, integrating different manufacturing processes and reusing materials across different processes. A number of results have demonstrated that circularity can deliver on both resource recycling and on reducing climate emissions. Thus, our Sustainability Strategy contains a circular economy aspiration to move away from the traditional linear ‘take-make-dispose’ manufacturing model to a more regenerative model. This is in line with the SDG 12 'Responsible Consumption and Production'.

There is an interest within the pharmaceutical industry to increase what can be recycled and reused in packaging materials. This is being pursued at the association level in close dialogue with relevant health authorities.

Access to clean water resources is a growing global challenge. We work continuously to reduce our consumption of water and wastewater and have significantly done so over many years. Our savings on water consumption are due to technological improvements and various optimization activities on our production sites. We continuously map our water consumption to identify even more reduction potentials.   

The mapping showed that the discharge of purified water holds significant reduction potential and we will focus our efforts here in the coming years. As per World Resources Institute classifications, our research and production facilities are in low or low-medium areas of water availability. We carefully manage three areas in this regard: Water usage, wastewater and discharge of chemical residues into aquatic ecosystems. We ensure that water usage and wastewater emissions do not diminish the supply of clean water or degrade water quality. 

We acknowledge stakeholder concerns about pharmaceutical residues in the environment. These mainly come from patients’ excretion of medicines taken to treat or prevent a disease. We test the environmental effects of new medicinal products and design processes with the least possible environmental impact.

We pursue approaches that balance healthcare needs and environmental considerations in line with EFPIA’s Eco-Pharmaco-Stewardship Initiative to minimise pharmaceuticals in the environment and UN Sustainability Development Goal 12 on responsible consumption and production. Read more about the EFPIA Eco-Pharmaco-Stweardship Initiative. 

We do not operate in areas of high biodiversity value. Nor do we source natural resources from suppliers operating under a biodiversity policy or certification scheme e.g. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). However, Lundbeck takes biodiversity seriously and we seek to reduce our environmental impact by performing risk assessments, optimise processes and use the least harmful substances in our production.