Pharmaceutical products are essential to public health, but their life cycle can come with significant environmental costs. Traditional manufacturing often relies on hazardous solvents, energy-intensive processes, and long, linear supply chains. And once a medicine has done its job, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and their metabolites do not vanish magically: they can persist in the environment, contributing to pollution and posing risks to ecosystems.
Addressing these challenges requires a systemic life-cycle approach that integrates environmental sustainability into pharmaceutical research and development, production, use and disposal. In this regard, the European Commission has launched an ambitious Green Pharma agenda, funding five Horizon Europe projects. We are IMPACTIVE, ENVIROMED, ETERNAL, SusPharma and TransPharm, and together we form the Green Pharma Cluster.
On its own, each project focuses on different aspects of green pharma. Together, our collective insights provide a strong evidence base for policy action. We have distilled this collective wisdom in the Towards a Green Pharmaceutical Future in Europe policy brief. Its objective is to inform policy recommendations that can accelerate Europe’s transition towards a more environmentally sustainable and resilient pharmaceutical sector.
The policy brief focuses on two priority policy areas that are essential for fostering the implementation of green and sustainable practices within Europe’s pharmaceutical industry:
- Streamline regulatory barriers and promote the adoption of innovative and sustainable technologies in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
- Closing regulatory gaps and taking advantage of opportunities to embed Environmental Sustainability in pharmaceutical regulation
Some core recommendations include mandating green-by-design principles in pharmaceutical R&D, accelerating the industrial uptake of green and enabling technologies, and promoting circularity and safe end-of-life management.
You can read the full document through our Zenodo repository here.