Material resource efficiency

Managing the resources we use and the waste we produce is a key feature of our environmental strategy.

Alongside the work we do to reduce our carbon footprint and to advance understanding of the impact of pharmaceuticals in the environment, we continue to refine and enhance our processes for managing waste. This often brings associated benefits for our business as we improve our production techniques and adopt more efficient processes.

Our waste is categorised as ‘hazardous waste’ or ‘other waste’ according to national legislation, which varies in its definitions. The majority of our hazardous waste consists of solvent and aqueous streams from manufacturing activities. Other waste includes general waste from our facilities around the world.

Our primary focus is waste prevention. Where this is not practical, we concentrate on waste minimisation and appropriate treatment or disposal to maximise the reuse and recycling of materials and minimise disposal to landfill. We use the commonly accepted waste hierarchy to guide our choices.

Programmes designed to reduce the amount of waste we generate include the continual improvement of existing production processes, minimising the environmental burden of new production processes under development, integration of environmental considerations in purchasing and internal waste awareness programmes.

Third parties manufacture some key intermediates and products on our behalf. The contribution of waste data from outsourced manufacture is not included in our performance data but we continue to track and report third party waste production in the Outsourced manufacture section.

Objectives and targets

A new set of objectives and targets has now been set. They are ambitious, reflecting our determination to drive continuous improvement in line with our long term commitment to delivering business success responsibly. In the area of material resource efficiency the targets are wider than simple waste reduction although we want to deliver a further 15% reduction in our waste footprint indexed appropriately. In addition to this and to demonstrate our commitment, we have introduced targets to drive adoption of waste disposal options with least environmental impact. Our targets in the waste area are:

• To decrease hazardous waste amount (indexed to sales) by 15%
• To decrease non-hazardous waste amount (indexed to number of employees) by 15%
• To increase proportion of waste sent for material recycling/recovery/reuse from 41% to 50%
• To decrease proportion of non-hazardous waste sent for landfill from 23% to 10%

All of these targets are to be met by the end of 2015 and are measured from a 2010 baseline.
In addition we have adopted targets to reduce material use in packaging and manufacturing processes that will contribute to our long term resource efficiency performance. You can read more about these targets in the Product Stewardship section.

Transparency

We are committed to transparency and constructive engagement on this topic. As part of this, we make detailed reports available through our Annual Report and this Responsibility section of our website. We follow the G3 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to enhance the relevance and transparency of our reporting to our stakeholders.

Waste generation

The amounts of hazardous and other waste that our activities have generated in recent years are shown in the table below. In 2011 we have made good progress towards our new disposal targets but there has been an increase in waste generated based on increasing production volumes of key brands. A number of projects have already been identified by our facilities to ensure progress towards our waste reduction targets.

Waste disposal routes for our hazardous and other waste in 2011 are shown in the chart below. It should be noted that these figures do not include the very large amount of material reused and recycled within our facilities, such as solvent recovery and reuse, since this material is excluded from our definition of waste.

Construction waste

AstraZeneca recognises that waste also arises as the result of construction and demolition activities at our sites and we aim to dispose of this in a sustainable way. Annual data for construction/demolition waste has therefore been collated and this shows that 13.3 thousand tonnes were generated during 2011 of which 83% was sent for material recycle/recovery/reuse. This amount is a significant increase on the 2010 total of 2.6 thousand tonnes (73% sent for material recycle/recovery/reuse) due to a number of major construction, demolition and refurbishment projects at our sites globally. The vast majority of all the construction waste generated (>99%) was non-hazardous.

To illustrate our approach, in 2011 a major R&D building project at our Alderley Park site in the UK was completed and a material recycle/recovery/reuse rate for construction waste of 98% was achieved; this is typical of rates achieved for recent engineering projects in the UK and this example of best practice has been widely shared across our engineering community.

Solvent use and emissions

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) or solvents are released to air primarily from the use of solvents in manufacturing processes and research and development activities. Reporting of our consumption and emission of VOCs is divided into two categories; non-halogenated VOCs that account for the majority of our use and halogenated VOCs that are generally considered to have a higher environmental impact.

We minimise emissions to air by using VOC abatement equipment including technologies such as catalytic oxidation, low-temperature cryogenic condensation and adsorption of pollutants on activated carbon.

During 2011 our facilities used 13 thousand tonnes of solvents, an increase of 23% from 2010 linked to production activities.

Emissions of VOCs over the same period totalled 313 tonnes, a decrease of 9% from 2010. Our emissions represent a very small fraction (<5%) of the total amount of consumed solvent.

Halogenated solvent use (347 tonnes) and related VOC emissions (10 tonnes) make up a small portion of these totals.

Other air emissions

NOx, SOx and particulate (PM10) emissions, which contribute to acid rain and local air pollution, have been calculated from the data on all fuel used at our sites and in our vehicle fleet (see carbon footprint for details), using published emission factors obtained from the UK NAEI Emission Factor Database. Emissions of NOx was 297 tonnes in 2011. Similarly, SOx emissions have been calculated as 18 tonnes and PM10 20 tonnes. The data presented here includes information from our biologics business for the first time in 2011. This accounts for the rise of 12% in our NOx emissions from 2010. Excluding this data, NOx has increased by 10% and SOx and PM10 have decreased by 23% and 2% respectively from 2010 figures on a like-for-like basis.

Emissions of other air pollutants are monitored locally at our sites where this is relevant. Quantities are not tracked globally because emission of these pollutants from our activities is insignificant at a company level.