AstraZeneca International - pharmaceutical company, prescription drugs, medicine manufacturers

As we commemorate World Environment Day, we look back on AstraZeneca’s accomplishments to date and ahead to the challenges that remain.

In recent years, we have made good progress in our effort to reduce our carbon footprint. In 2007, our carbon emissions from all sources were 67% less than they were in 1990. (The Kyoto Protocol target is a 5% reduction by 2012). Our environmental performance score in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index has been consistently industry-leading.

It’s a track record that we are proud of – but as we drive the growth of our business, our challenge will be to ensure that we continue to make a meaningful contribution to the global effort to achieve a “low carbon economy.”

Like most businesses, our carbon footprint arises primarily from energy use at our facilities and from the various means of transport that we use. But AstraZeneca faces an additional challenge directly associated with our commitment to providing medicines that make a difference for patients worldwide. Some of our asthma treatments use a pressurised metered dose inhaler (pMDI) that relies on a hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) propellant (a greenhouse gas) to deliver the medicine to a patient’s airways. Patients who are unable to use our Turbuhaler dry powder inhaler, which does not require propellants, need these pMDI products.

The 2007 launch of Symbicort pMDI in the US, the world’s largest pharmaceutical market, is benefiting more and more patients, but also resulting in an associated increase in HFA emissions. Despite the climate change implications, we believe that the expanded treatment choice and potential benefits that Symbicort pMDI offers asthma sufferers substantially outweigh the potential environmental impact.

AstraZeneca is currently evaluating the option of offsetting the climate change impact of our products or business activities at a corporate level; certain types of offsetting can be beneficial, but should never replace efforts to directly control emissions. Therefore, for now, while local or activity-specific offsetting initiatives will be considered on a case-by-case basis, we believe that our collective effort should be focused on what we can do to continue to deliver sustainable improvement in the company’s environmental performance.

This means working to rigorously control those emissions that are within our control (from facilities and travel) and managing responsibly those which are outside our direct control (for example, from our products and from suppliers). We will also continue to communicate transparently about our commitment and progress, and actively seek and use external opportunities to learn and share best practice.

Although the impact of our growing Symbicort business means that we will not be able to continue to deliver the overall reductions we have in previous years, our current climate change target aims to ensure that our absolute emissions in 2010 will be no greater than they were at the start of the decade and 55% less than they were in 1990. This includes a commitment to achieve, by 2010, an absolute reduction of 12% (compared to 2005) in the global warming emissions from all sources other than pMDIs. And we are now developing our strategy for delivering continued substantial improvement beyond 2010.

Our new Code of Conduct requires everyone at AstraZeneca to take personal responsibility for managing the environmental impact of their work activities and to actively participate in identifying opportunities within individual business areas and sites to further reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.