ÍâÍøÌìÌÃ

Ìý

Phasing out actual emissions is the goal but, in the meantime, targets and metrics to guide, define, and measure progress are needed. Transparent metrics and procedures ensure that efforts are based on consensus of the best available evidence – and that carbon-accounting methodologies and accepted data sources are included to communicate and present data.

The integration of more detailed, unified (standardized) metrics, and indicators is key to a sustainable chemical industry. To sustainably address environmental hotspots, assessments should be possible at earliest stages of projects. The question then becomes how a quantification of environmental impacts can be obtained and how to best detect and display environmental hotspots to key stakeholders. For the pharmaceutical industry, this demands a comprehensive understanding of environmental impacts across multiple dimensions, including resource use, emissions, waste generation, and the handling of substances of concerns like PFAS or other regulates subtances.

To do so, process development has traditionally relied on simplified metrics to compare synthetic routes, such as process mass intensity (PMI). While useful, these metrics often fail to capture absolute sustainability or differentiate between broader ecological impacts. More holistic approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA), address these gaps but are typically data-intensive, time-consuming, and complex to interpret, particularly at early development stages where data availability is limited.

To bridge this gap, we developed and implemented an LCA-inspired framework at Novartis that enables standardized, early-stage environmental assessment using a combination of qualitative and semi-quantitative indicators, affording simple and actionable outputs. This approach combines PMI-derived metrics with selected environmental impact indicators and additional process descriptors, such as convergence, enabling the identification of environmental hotspots and the evaluation of process developability. The output of our assessments is then condensed and re-introduced into future projects, route selection and planning, adding sustainable development.

Ìý