UKCEH is part of a new four-year European project that will contribute to the sustainable development of pharmaceuticals, by using and promoting lifecycle approaches to their design, manufacture, usage, and disposal.
This EC Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action will assess the environmental risks of active pharmaceutical ingredients, residues and metabolites and also other chemicals and by-products of production processes.
This project will inform the types of green manufacturing currently under consideration by the pharmaceutical industry. The risk and lifecycle assessment approaches being developed will be applied to six case studies, which will provide industry and policy makers with key examples of how whole lifecycle assessment may be used in practice to evaluate changes in environmental impacts due to the introduction of 'green' manufacturing processes.
Funded under the EU’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme, ETERNAL will help to tackle the challenge of maintaining ongoing access to safe, high quality and effective pharmaceutical treatments for citizens and animals, whilst ensuring sustainable supply chains and consumption patterns and avoiding undue impacts of pharmaceutical residues on the environment.
Dr Sam Harrison, an environmental chemistry modeller at UKCEH, says: “We will bring the latest scientific knowledge into regulatory risk assessment, enabling us to rank current in-use pharmaceuticals in terms of those that pose the greatest environmental risk, and to assess how the modifications made within the project case studies reduce risk. This allows us to target mitigations, modifications and management strategies to reduce this risk, ultimately towards a greener, more sustainable environment.”