Manufacturing showcase
Achieving sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.
The pharmaceutical sector produces around one thousand times more hazardous waste per kg of product than that oil refining, most of this is solvent which is used once and incinerated, it is also a significant consumer of water and energy.
Avenues open to address this include:
- Increasing API potency in drug discovery / candidate selection reduces the mass to be manufactured so consuming less resources.
- Replacing large scale batch processing capability with low utilisation, with agile and compact continuous process equipment significantly reduces manufacturing footprint and energy consumption, this also increases manufacturing flexibility.
- Focusing on minimisation of solvent use by smart solvent selection in process design, by telescoping multiple stages in a single solvent and by application of in process solvent recycling.
CHRIS PRICE | Professor of Industrial Crystallization and Isolation | University of Strathclyde