Product sustainability

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We follow processes throughout the life cycle of our products with the aim of understanding and addressing their environmental impact; from discovery through development and production, to launch of a new product and to end of product life.

Our approach

People and the planet will benefit from those medicines which have the smallest possible environmental impact yet maintain the highest medical efficacy and safety standards. As technologies and healthcare systems evolve, so should solutions to reduce energy, water, material use, waste and pollution generated from designing, manufacturing and delivering medicines to patients. We know that the greenhouse gas emissions from our product value chains make the most significant contribution to our company Scope 3 emissions, and we are addressing these across our business using a data-driven approach.

We have implemented an internal Product Sustainability Index (PSI) to understand the environmental impacts of our products and inform improvement plans. We also lead our industry in the management of Pharmaceuticals in the Environment (PIE) and promote responsible product stewardship. More details of our approach can be found in our position statement on Pharmaceuticals in the Environment.

Sustainable decision-making and environmental improvements are embedded across the product life cycle:

We have integrated business processes to ensure safety, health and environmental aspects are considered throughout drug development, with guidance on environmental assessment of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing, formulation, packaging and devices
We have targets for API manufacturing emissions from both AstraZeneca and our external supply sites
We conduct, fund and support research on the environmental impact of our products and apply the principles of green chemistry in our business
Our life cycle assessment (LCA) programme determines the type and magnitude of environmental impacts across our product value chains and is in line with ISO standards 14040 and 14044
We invest in new science and disruptive technologies, allowing design of shorter chemical sequences to our APIs, and improve processes for our new modality medicines, significantly reducing environmental impact
We are working on redesigning our packaging to make it more sustainable
We are a leading partner in collaborations to drive common standards for illustrating environmental footprints of our medicines
Ecopharmacovigilance (EPV) is our approach to understanding pharmaceuticals in the environment. Our EPV process reviews emerging science and literature, looking for new information that might change the way we assess the environmental risks associated with our APIs. On our industry-leading Ecopharmacovigilance dashboard, users can visualise the relative risks of our APIs that are found in the environment.. The data are made transparent in the Environmental Risk Assessment documents on our website.
As part of our commitment to drive thought leadership and innovation to manage PIE, we are the industry lead of the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) PREMIER consortium, a public-private partnership between the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). We are helping develop tools to identify potential environmental risks of APIs and make these tools and data more accessible to all stakeholders.