Why standardising LCA in pharma is a challenge worth pursuing
- Post Date
- 19 April 2025
- Read Time
- 5 minutes
Two life cycle assessments, same product, same year, opposite conclusions: is the pursuit of comparable environmental impact assessments a fool's errand, or the only way to build a truly sustainable future?
Recently I spent a couple of days in Zurich with SLR colleagues and fellow life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioner members of the Pharma LCA Consortium [1]. The consortium’s goal is to facilitate a universal approach to assessing the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products. A significant part of that is to align on how LCAs should be performed, by developing a set of pharmaceutical product category rules (a PCR) so that everyone follows the same calculation approach. However, trying to write rules around, for example, how to deal with downtime, seasonality, cleaning, labs, etc., is proving to be complex and highly nuanced. So much so, in fact, that at lunch on the first day, I asked some of the delegates whether it was really worth the effort to try to make pharma LCAs comparable at all.
2025 marks the 20th anniversary of my first LCA, and I am happy to spend the majority of my time on LCA work these days, including training colleagues and clients. One slide in my default deck presents the outcomes of two LCA studies performed in 2019 on the best choice of metal for car bodies, from a carbon perspective. The first, by Aluminium Insider [2], concluded the lighter weight of aluminium meant that in-use emissions are lower, resulting in aluminium being better than steel for this application. The second study, by WorldAutoSteel [3], concluded the high production emissions for aluminium meant that steel was the better material.
How can two LCAs on the same subject in the same year reach polar opposite conclusions?
The answer probably lies in the ISO14040-44 rules for LCA, which allow the user to set the scope and system boundary of a study in whatever way makes the best sense for achieving the stated goal. If that goal is carefully worded, it may follow that the scope and system boundary can be defined in a way that favours a particular outcome. To be clear, I’m not accusing either organisation of such practices in this instance, but their divergent conclusions are striking. More generally, my advice would be to always be aware of who commissioned an LCA study, because that just might influence the results. Whilst this hints at bias in the studies, the reality is more likely to be bias in the publication, in that LCA studies that do not support a company’s objectives tend not to be released publicly.
You might well ask why the ISO rules ‘allow’ this sort of behaviour, but there is logic there. Despite the name, it doesn’t always make sense for a life cycle assessment to look at the full life cycle of a product. Many of the early LCAs I did were in waste management. In these scenarios, how the waste arose in the first place is of little consequence. The question is, (for example) given the waste in this authority’s household bins, what is the best route to manage it?
Similarly, a steel manufacturer often doesn’t need to look beyond the creation of a billet. The steel might be used for thousands of different products, and trying to consider their impacts will likely have no impact, or negligible impact, on the steel manufacturer’s activities; in this instance, a cradle-to-gate system boundary is most appropriate.
In this spirit, my question to the Pharma LCA folk concerned whether they need a PCR at all. The companies could use LCAs to examine their processes, identify the hot spots and take measures to improve them and thereby improve the environmental credentials of their products. The only thing we might need to do is limit what they claim about the ‘greenness’ of their products, as such claims might not be comparable.
The issue with this approach is that, for many sectors including pharma, we find that over three-quarters of the carbon footprint of the products (and many of the other environmental impacts we examine in LCA) arises not from the manufacturing activities of the pharma companies, but from the raw materials that they purchase. By now, most pharma companies will have taken significant steps to decarbonise their own production, through measures such as energy efficiency drives and installing or purchasing renewable energy. With fewer options to further decarbonise production, and with most of the impact embedded in their raw materials, it is natural for them to turn to their suppliers and explore what they can do.
This puts the onus on the suppliers to calculate and report the carbon footprints of their products, and we can see how purchasing decisions now, and in the future, may increasingly depend on who has the lowest impact. In this scenario, giving companies free rein on how they set their calculation boundaries is a non-starter, and so it becomes important that everyone is using the same method.
And this is why, when I asked the Pharma LCAmembers whether it might be unrealistic to want to be able to compare LCAs, they all said no. No-one thinks it will be easy, but everyone thinks it is worth doing so that the playing field is level, and everyone will be using the same methodology. Sound purchasing decisions will follow, and the right signals can be sent up the supply chain that superior environmental performance is a quality that merits a premium price.
When put like that, for me the pharma PCR becomes a challenge worth achieving, and I’m looking forward to helping the members complete the project. If you think you might benefit from understanding the environmental impacts of your products or services, please get in touch to discuss a way forward.
Advisory Digest
Enjoyed this article? For more like it, get SLR's quarterly sustainable business briefing straight to your inbox.
Sign up
----------------------------
References
[2] Publication no longer online
Recent posts
-
-
-
Understanding sound flanking: Fire alarm speaker cable conduits in multi-family buildings
by Neil Vyas
View post