Comparing pharmaceutical sustainability data from facility to facility, and company to company, can be a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The variation in measurement and reporting can make it nigh on impossible. On a hopeful note, however, the end of 2025 saw the launch of the first global standard offering a harmonised, practical framework to measure and assess the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products throughout their lifecycle.
This new standard, BSI PAS 2090, revolves around the concept of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This method is used to evaluate the environmental impact of a drug across its entire life cycle, with the findings often used to identify where the greatest environmental impact is occurring.
Two of the most influential participants in the creation of the standard were Courtney Soulsby and Daniel Witte. Soulsby is the Sector Development Director at BSI, whilst Witte is a Director in the Corporate Sustainability Advisory team at SLR Consulting, which provides the Project Management Office (PMO) to the Pharmaceutical LCA Consortium, a group of eleven pharmaceutical companies that co-sponsored the standard. Both experts were critical in leading and coordinating the development, and spoke to Cleanroom Technology about the pivotal standard.
Speaking to Soulsby and Witte, one of the first big steps critical to the success of 2090 was getting consensus from pharma giants. In this, the standard succeeded by drawing major attention from contributors such as AstraZeneca, GSK, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk, as well as over 475 stakeholders in 35 countries.
Outside of the pharmaceutical sector, the standard was also supported by NHS England, and the Office for Life Sciences (OLS). Pharmaceutical companies are seemingly crying out for harmonisation, but as end users of medicines, healthcare facilities also have a huge vested interest in knowing the carbon footprint of medicine. Once the standard was released, this demand for a consistent method for LCA was evident, with Witte saying that it “smashed records” in first week downloads.
Companies are required to disclose “how much primary and secondary data… [they] used,” ensuring fair comparison
Need for consistency
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