European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer editor Reece Armstrong sits down with Jeffrey Whitford, head of global corporate responsibility and branding and Fabien Thibault, global manager of product and packaging sustainability at the life science business of Merck KGaA* to discuss the company’s new approach to environmental sustainability in packaging.
Packaging sustainability
The pharmaceutical industry has faced its fair share of scandals over the years - unfair hikes in drug prices and dangerous medicines to name just some – yet its impact on the environment has never been one.
Yet a recent study from McMaster University made headlines due to its findings that the pharma industry is a significant contributor to global warming and even eclipses the automotive industry in terms of carbon emissions.
One company is now trying to offset its environmental impact through a corporate responsibility plan that targets a four-year approach at improving packaging sustainability in the life sciences sector.
Merck - through its life sciences business – has launched its SMASH Packaging Plan to match previous efforts in improving product sustainability.
With a deadline of 2022, Merck is targeting four aspects of packaging to reduce the amount of packaging it uses; achieve zero deforestation; improve plastic sustainability and maximise recycling.
Considering the company ships 30,000 packages each day, not to mention the complexity of the pharma supply chain, it’s an almost unfathomable task, but one that is necessary in an era in which environmental concerns are becoming more widespread.
“It [SMASH] has been in the pipeline for a few years and I think it builds on a consistent approach for us in terms of how we’ve approached our corporate responsibility,” Whitford said.
Recent years have seen Merck undertake a number of acquisitions in order to transform itself into a major science and technology player; undercutting its original focus solely on pharma and chemicals. More so, 2015 saw the company undergo a major rebrand which represented, in Whitford’s view, an opportunity to ‘strategically pair how we can look at materials, sustainability and partnering this with a branding change’.
The plan’s holistic approach to tackle sustainability across its entire packaging line is evident when Whitford explains the challenges the company is facing to improve its environmentalism.
“One of the things you see from customers is they’ve got a lot of unnecessary packaging and excess material that doesn’t need to be included,” Whitford said.
“How do we do a better job of getting our teams to select the right package for the product that the customer’s ordered? Look at plastics sustainability. How do we increase what we’re doing to try and find replacements for certain substances? How do we deal with or handle polystyrene? That’s a huge component, certainly in today’s discussion around plastic waste in the ocean. This is a really important one for us to be talking about. Looking at deforestation. When customers purchase from us, how do we ensure they know they’re not contributing to deforestation?”
The company’s approach to sustainability can be seen across other areas of its business. For example, Whitford explained that Merck has just launched a novel greener alternative in the solvents space, Cyrene, to act as a replacement for NMP (N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone) and DMF (Dimethylformamide).
However, the company saw that without a proper strategy in place for packaging, then its plan doesn’t make sense, according to Whitford.
“We want to be able to provide that full platform and options for the customer, but you’ve got to have all the pieces in place. If you try to have that conversation about green chemistry and novel materials but you have this gap in the packaging front, the story doesn’t fully make sense.”
For a company that ships such large numbers of products every day, it makes sense for Merck to improve its packaging sustainability. Pharma might have emerged so far unscathed from any media scandals regarding environmentalism but this isn’t guaranteed to last, especially in an age where a company’s reputation can be brought down by a single tweet.
That’s why Merck is looking to invest in new methods and technologies to reduce the amount of packaging excess it creates.
“In our distribution centres we are investigating solutions like packaging on demand, the types of innovative solutions that can create the distribution box that can be used to ship your product, case-by-case,” Thibault said.
According to Thibault, the idea is to create packaging that is the perfect fit for a customer’s product, and which optimises the use of corrugated and excess material. And while changes to the company’s operations might be invisible to the customer, Thibault states that this too ‘has an impact’.
He cites examples such as notifying packaging teams to be more aware of the amount of packaging they’re using and also of the excess materials used during manufacturing.
“This is something that is not visible to our customers but we are looking at optimising this internal packaging to reduce the amount of packaging we use, for instance when we ship a material from a distribution centre to another,” Thibault said.
With a deadline of 2022 it will be interesting to see what conversations emerge around pharma’s role in protecting the environment. Industries like food and beverage have so far been at the forefront of environmental concerns and Whitford believes there is ample opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
“I think one of the good opportunities here is how do you take what we’ve learned from the food and beverage debate and figure out how it’s worked in this space and is applicable to this use case,” he said.
Whether the industry follows suit and improves its environmental standing is still up for debate but Whitford certainly hopes so.
“We hope the industry follows suit but while it is a competitive advantage, at the end of the day, what we want is what’s better for the global ecosystem and landscape. And that is more people making changes and if we can help lead that, that’s probably one of the highest compliments we can be paid.”