Promoting best practice

During 2007, we partnered with the Chinese Occupational Safety and Health Association to hold a two-day conference on promoting excellence in process safety in China. The conference included attendees from relevant authorities and universities as well as current and potential suppliers. As a result of this conference, we have supported the establishment of a process safety laboratory at Tianjian University in China and assisted with training. Collaboration with the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and contract research organisations will continue.  Plans are being developed to hold an environmental conference in China in 2009. AstraZeneca is sponsoring the conference, and jointly developing the agenda with the China Ministry of Environmental Protection.

In January 2007, AstraZeneca joined The Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI), a group of major pharmaceutical companies that formed to support pharmaceutical suppliers to operate in a manner consistent with industry expectations about labour, health and safety, environment, ethics and management systems. As a first step, the PSCI created the Pharmaceutical Industry Principles for Responsible Supply Chain Management. These Principles, address five areas of responsible business practices throughout the pharmaceutical industry's supply chain: ethics, labour, health and safety, environment and related management systems.  We are actively participating in discussions on these key aspects and will continue to be a member in PSCI striving for developing tools for best practice sharing within the pharmaceutical industry.

We have launched several initiatives to drive environmental awareness and development, including a purchasing sustainability project with particular focus on AstraZeneca’s environmental footprint and how purchasing decisions could be managed to improve our environmental impact. This project has resulted in general and specific environmental questions being included in the sourcing process.

We also share our knowledge about the environmental impact of manufacturing high volume active pharmaceutical ingredients with suppliers to promote best practice.

In addition, our SHE teams have been working since 2005 with over thirty of our external manufacturing partners to measure the environmental impact of their manufacturing activity. The measures we are currently using are waste production and CO2 emissions from energy use.  Read more.

The content of this page was externally assured by Bureau Veritas, February 2009.