Astrazeneca PLC

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Revision as of 10:41, 19 July 2007

Climate Change

In common with most businesses, our potential impact on climate change arises from the greenhouse gas emissions from energy use at our facilities, from other in-house activities and from the various means of transport we use. However, we also face an additional challenge since some of our asthma therapy products use propellant gases that potentially contribute to ozone depletion and global warming. In recent years, we have been making good progress in reducing our emissions but our challenge has always been to sustain improvement as we continue to grow our business.

We have identified areas of our business where further improvements can be made to reduce our emissions of global warming gases. These include, amongst other things:

• Implementation of further energy conservation programmes, particularly related to fume cupboards in laboratories.
• Implementation of green technology principles in our process design.
• Further investment in greener energy supply from external power suppliers.
• Installation of additional combined heat and power plants.
• Investment in ‘cleaner’ vehicles.

Nevertheless, our major challenge continues to be reducing these emissions quickly enough to offset the impact of our growing business. We will continue to work hard to manage our impact, and our new climate change target aims to ensure that our absolute emissions in 2010 will be no greater than they were at the start of the decade and 40% less than they were in 1990. Although the greenhouse gas emissions from our business operations will continue to fall, as a result of the planned launch of Symbicort pMDI in 2007, we will not be able to continue to achieve the reductions of total greenhouse gases (including emissions from products) that we have delivered each year since 2000.

We are committed to achieving our 2010 target without compromising our ability to provide new inhalation therapies that bring benefit for patients. Therefore the climate change objectives approved by the AstraZeneca Board in 2005 require very substantial efforts to be made across our business to produce, by 2010, an absolute reduction of 12% in global warming emissions from all sources other than pMDIs, when compared with 2005.

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Global Warming

Emissions from Energy Use

We use energy to manufacture our products and to heat, cool and light our facilities. Using fossil fuels, either directly or to generate electricity, results in the emission of CO2.

Different energy sources give rise to different levels of CO2 emissions. For instance district heating, primarily used in Nordic countries, normally uses bio-fuel, a renewable energy source, and results in very low net CO2 releases compared with burning coal, oil or gas. We follow the GhG Protocol guidelines to calculate our emissions. Specific emission factors for direct combustion of fuels are taken from the IPCC (Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Workbook, Volume 2), and those for purchased electricity are sourced from the International Energy Agency ( www.iea.org.)

Third parties also undertake some of our manufacturing and we have been making efforts to understand what emissions may come from this activity. See the section on Sustainable production for further details of this exercise.

Our approach Although AstraZeneca does not use a large amount of energy relative to its size, we recognise the importance of implementing programmes to maximise efficiency and minimise emissions.

Some progress is being made at a corporate level, such as building a proportion of renewable energy into energy procurement contracts and large capital programmes such as Combined Heat & Power (CHP) or cogeneration schemes. In addition, many of our sites around the world are pursuing energy efficiency projects and have made significant improvements.

Traditional generators burn fuel to provide a jet of hot gases. These are used to spin turbines that generate the electricity. But they also waste much of the energy content of the fuel as the exhaust carries a lot of heat, to be lost up a chimney. CHP uses this “waste” energy in the exhaust gases to generate steam and this means that the fuel efficiency is doubled compared to traditional turbine generation plant. CHP plant has been installed at two of our key manufacturing sites in Macclesfield, UK and Canovanas, Puerto Rico.

The market for renewable electricity remains volatile as the growth in demand far outstrips increases in supply capacity. Nevertheless, our take-up of electricity from renewable sources has exceeded our expectations since we secured a three-year supply contract with nPower to provide the majority of our UK facilities with Climate Change Levy exempt electricity for three years from July 2004. Furthermore, our headquarters building in London, our environmental science facility in Devon and our large research site in Leicestershire now have their electricity needs supplied from guaranteed CO2-free renewable resources. 39 kte CO2 has been avoided by these measures.

Our performance During 2006, total energy use at our facilities was 2460 GWh; the same as 2005 consumption. The main energy sources were natural gas (49%) and electricity (37%). The energy consumed in manufacturing activities accounts for two thirds of the total. The Group's energy costs are approximately $150 million. CO2 emissions from energy in 2006 were 568 kte, an increase of 2% from 2005. The nature and scale of our energy use and emissions of CO2 are shown in the charts.

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Sources

• 1. Climate Change
• 2. Global Warming