Environmental Impact and Healthcare Systems’ Resilience

Our ambition for nature focuses on optimizing and turning waste into resources, thinking of water as a valuable local resource, and preserving biodiversity through global and local actions.

Our circular economy ambition places waste reduction and circularity at its heart. Our operational waste objective is that, by end-2025, at least 90% of our waste will be reused, recycled or recovered and that all our sites will be landfill-free (<1%). Part of our post-consumer waste approach is to foster greater circularity through packaging & device design for reuse & recycling.

By 2030, we’ve set clear targets to sustain our water withdrawals at 15% less than 2019, ensuring we use this vital resource even more efficiently. Acknowledging that water challenges are specific to each watershed and need to be addressed at local level, we are implementing water efficiency management plan supplemented by context-based targets on all our manufacturing sites by 2030.

We have also adopted a proactive approach to minimize the potential impacts on ecosystems of pharmaceuticals in the environment.. By end-2025, all production sites will have implemented a plan to monitor, manage and reduce emissions of pharmaceutical residues in wastewater wherever needed. And by 2030, we will implement a global program to promote responsible use and the proper disposal of unused medicines.

By 2030, all our sites located near biodiversity sensitive areas will have developed specific biodiversity management plans. By end-2025, those plans will be in place for all our priority sites, and all relevant sites will have at least one biodiversity initiative in place. Our ambition now includes as well sourcing priority raw materials from deforestation-free sources.

Climate change and nature loss can pose both risks and opportunities to the business in the short, mid and long term. Therefore, we are collectively working to adapt our business to the environmental challenges which could impact our ability to support our patients. This includes mitigating the dependencies on natural resources and effects of climate change on our activities and human health.

We are also contributing to coordinated and collective international initiatives that reduce entire healthcare systems’ environmental footprints and improve their resilience. 

For example, Sanofi is actively involved in the Sustainable Market Initiative healthcare system taskforce with the aim to accelerate the delivery of net zero, sustainable healthcare to improve individual, societal and planetary health. The H Task Force is focusing its attention on delivering action in the following three priority areas: Supply chain, clinical trial digitalization and patient care pathway. 

Part of the different initiative,  Sanofi is leading the “Patient care pathway decarbonization” gathering public and private actors of healthcare systems. Keeping patients at the center, it is critical to focus on identifying opportunities to deliver net-zero patient care while improving health and societal outcomes. 

Leading the Pharma LCA Consortium that came together via the Pharmaceutical Environment Group (PEG) with support from the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), we aim to publish in 2025 a standardized LCA framework for measuring, reporting, and communicating product level environmental footprint data for the pharmaceutical sector.  

Through partnerships like the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI) and ENERGIZE, we support suppliers in reducing emissions and embedding sustainability across their value chain.