Pharmaceuticals

In the past decade, many large pharmaceutical companies have moved to using green-chemistry practices for drug discovery, development and manufacturing. These firms include ours, Amgen, and others such as the Merck Group, Abbott, Johnson & Johnson and Roche. Ranking systems such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices and the Pacific Sustainability Index1 track how well firms are doing.

The ACS Green Chemistry Institute® Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR) was developed in 2005 to encourage the integration of green chemistry and green engineering into the pharmaceutical industry. One of the strategic priorities of the Roundtable is to inform and influence the research agenda and an early step was the publication of a paper on key green chemistry research areas (KRA) from a pharmaceutical manufacturers’ perspective. The publication was followed up with the ongoing GCIPR Research Grant Programme.

The world's population is predicted to exceed 9 billion by 2050, with growth in the developing world projected to triple global resource consumption. Industries, including pharmaceuticals, will still be competing for one Earth's worth of resources to meet this tripled demand. In order to thrive in the future, it is clear that routes to pharmaceuticals, which currently produce in the order of 100 kg of waste for each kilogram of drug in an optimized process, will need to be more efficient and sustainable.