Novo Nordisk to go green by 2020
pharmafile | November 24, 2015 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â Novo Nordish, manufacturing, production, renewable energyÂ
Novo Nordisk has announced plans to go green in the next five years by using only electricity from renewable sources at all its global production sites by 2020.
Once implemented, the company says, there will be no carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the electricity used at the company’s plants. This expands on the company’s existing environmentally-friendly production sites in Denmark, Brazil and Japan, which use electricity from renewable sources.
Novo will face a challenge in reaching this target in just four years, however. The firm has operations expanding as a result of the rise in demand for the diabetes products in which the company specialises, as executive vice president and head of Novo Nordisk’s product supply, Henrik Wulff accepts: “Setting an absolute target of zero CO2 emissions from electricity at all our global production sites in just five years is ambitious, as our production is growing to meet the increasing global demand for our diabetes products,” he comments.
Novo Nordisk took an important step in achieving the 2020 ambition last month when Novo Nordisk’s production site in Tianjin, China, signed an agreement on purchasing electricity from a windmill farm in Inner Mongolia. Other production sites in the US, France, Russia, Algeria and Iran will enter similar agreements in the coming years, the company says.
“In Denmark, we get our electricity from windmills and this will also be the case in China, but there is not a one-size-fits-all solution and we will identify the most efficient renewable electricity sources for our production facilities in the other countries,” Wulff continues. “Switching to renewable electricity makes sense from both a climate and a cost perspective. As more companies invest in renewable electricity, the technology is likely to get even more efficient and less costly.”
Novo Nordisk has recently, together with some of world’s most influential companies, joined the RE100: a collaborative initiative of global businesses committed to using 100% renewable electricity. Johnson & Johnson has also signed up to the scheme.
Joel Levy
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