Ahead of Pharmapack Europe 2025, an event that has been integral to driving pharmaceutical sustainability over the last decade, Silvia Forroova, Informa Market’s Director of Partnerships & Sustainability shares her thoughts in what lies ahead.
In an era of increasing environmental awareness, the pharmaceutical industry is facing significant sustainability challenges. From reducing energy consumption through more efficient process chemistries and improving waste management to reshaping how sustainability stories are told, the sector must balance advancing eco-friendly practices and recycling while meeting ever tightening regulatory requirements and drive to improved patient centricity – which has often meant more complex and harder to recycle devices.
My role at Informa spans three key areas: encouraging behavioural change in the pharma industry, improving our own operational practices, and fostering collaboration through the Sustainability Collective. At Pharmapack, an event at the heart of pharma’s drug delivery and devices sector, we have continued to try and harness our ability to bring the industry together – to proffer new learnings, insights and working groups on key themes. One such new initiative is the Sustainability Collective – more on that shortly – and taking lessons from our own research. For example, many of the stakeholders at our events reported to us that they find the story telling aspects of sustainability and employee engagement to be a key challenge.
In fact, some pharmaceutical companies struggle to effectively communicate their sustainability efforts sufficiently to drive the behavioural change across their workforce. Whether its pitching new initiatives to investors or engaging employees in daily eco-friendly actions like proper recycling, companies need to prioritise clarity and inclusivity in their messaging. Once engaged, employees will bring new ideas forward. In our own offices we recently conducted training sessions on using the recycling bins – when we asked, we found that most employees did not use them just because they were unsure of how to. This simple step significantly improved waste management, demonstrating how small behavioural changes can lead to substantial results.
On a bigger scale, Pharmapack is now powered by renewable energy. Tulipe are our sustainability partners for 2024 – they undertake tremendous work in distributing pharmaceutical donations to humanitarian organisations. At the upcoming event we will display our largest ever sustainability platform with a record number of sessions, working groups and showcases such as the Sustainability Centre and a dedicated Partners Village, all of which are done to underscore a collaborative approach.
