Astrazeneca PLC
From Lauraibm
Revision as of 10:32, 19 July 2007
Astrazeneca PLC and the Environment
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.
(1)
