Waste management

We take the management of our waste very seriously and are working to reduce our total waste index as an element of our 2006-10 SHE improvement targets (40% by 2010 from a 2001/2 baseline). See SHE Objectives for more details.

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 effluent streams from manufacturing activities. Other waste includes general waste from our facilities around the world.

The primary objective in waste minimisation is waste prevention. Where this is not practicable, we strive toward the reuse and recycling of materials, including energy recovery from the incineration of waste streams. 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.

For example, in the US during 2008 we introduced a Tyvek® re-use/recycling programme for disposable garments used at our facilities in clean rooms, manufacturing plants and animal laboratories. During the year ~3 tonnes of waste material was sent for reuse or recycling rather than to landfill.

In the UK a programme to manage and share surplus equipment across sites is now well established, and results in equipment being reused, waste prevented and during 2008 has avoided costs of >$1.5m. The system is already being used effectively in the US and Sweden.

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

OUR PERFORMANCE

The amounts of hazardous and other waste that our activities have generated in recent years are shown in the table below.

Waste disposal routes for our hazardous and other waste in 2008 are shown in the chart below. We differentiate between the material recycled and the waste incinerated with energy recovery. 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.

The amount of hazardous waste recovered in 2008 (including material recycling and incineration with energy recovery) was 46%. The total waste recycling and incineration with energy recovery rate in 2008 was 57%.

CONSTRUCTION WASTE

AstraZeneca recognises that waste also arises as the result of construction activities undertaken on our behalf. Annual data for construction waste has therefore been collated and this shows that during 2008 23 ktonnes were generated. This is a tenth of the 2007 total of 228 thousand tonnes. The vast majority of all the construction waste generated (88%) was non-hazardous.

In 2008 our commitment in this area resulted in our UK Engineering department, in partnership with the construction waste consultancy Wilson James, winning the ASDA Award for Recycling Target Success at the UK National Recycling Awards. This was the result of a successful project where >99% of construction waste, an amount of approximately 8000 tonnes, was recovered and reused or recycled.