Pfizer’s Loughbeg first pharma facility to meet green standard
pharmafile | November 27, 2011 | News story | Manufacturing and Production | ISO 50001, Loughbeg, Pfizer, environmental
A Pfizer facility in Ireland has become the first pharmaceutical plant in the world to meet a tough new standard for energy management.
The Loughbeg facility has been certified as conforming to the International Standards Organization’s ISO 50001 standard, which is designed to improve the energy performance of buildings, with an emphasis on energy efficiency, use and consumption.
Pfizer set up a facility-wide Energy and Climate Change (ECC) programme to try to reduce energy use, lower carbon dioxide emissions and cut the cost of energy for all business operations at the plant.
The company intends to expand the programme to include other facilities in its network.
ISO launched the ISO 50001 standard in June, saying at the time that it could have a positive impact on 60% of the world’s energy use. The main thrust of the document is the creation of energy management systems and processes that monitor and control an organisation’s energy use across the supply chain, for raw materials through recycling.
Pharma has traditionally been an energy-intensive industry, and while there has been a shift towards greener and more cost-efficient processes in recent years, the recession has lent greater urgency to these efforts.
Many of the individual components of an energy management programme are already widely used in the industry. For example, heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems represent a hefty cost for facilities that can be cut by using monitoring and control systems, while heat recovery systems can reuse hot or cold energy found in HVAC-exhausted air.
In many cases, however, a co-ordinated system to co-ordinate all these elements is lacking. Pfizer implemented a programme which looked at all aspects of the ISO 50001, including: significant energy users, energy saving opportunities, energy actions and planning, corrective
The Loughbeg facility was put up for sale by Pfizer last year as part of a major revamp of its manufacturing network. One of the main activities at the site is the production of Lipitor (atorvastatin), Pfizer’s top-selling cholesterol drug which is facing generic competition.
Phil Taylor
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