More Green: Overview
Our pillar MORE GREEN encompasses environmental initiatives that consider many different aspects: building up facilities close to nature to provide habitats for a variety of plants and animals, encouraging “green” behavior of our employees, adopting measures to avoid water and air pollution, using renewable energy, reducing waste and creating environmentally friendly products as well as implementing certified systems for environmental protection and energy management. Our focus is on protecting natural resources, including clean water and our path to carbon neutrality in our operations.
More Green is an important pillar of the ‘Sustainable Development - For Generations’ framework and is a long-term program that underlines the complexity and also the far-reaching goals in this space. Boehringer Ingelheim’s commitment to More Green is underscored by a series of initiatives - many of which have been active for over a decade.
With the initiative “Carbon Footprint” we have set our sights on becoming carbon neutral in our operations by 2030. To achieve this, we are purchasing energy from renewable sources, and we are planning further reductions in our emissions across our value chain. We are concentrating on the sustainability of our major projects and have established a MORE GREEN capital expenditures fund as well as an internal CO2 pricing method in order to invest in a green future and promote environmentally friendly solutions. The ‘More Green Fund’ has already helped to initiate approximately 40 new environmental sustainability projects since 2020.
Initiatives: Carbon Footprint
We are also aiming to reduce our natural resource footprint across our value chain and to protect clean water as we are aware of the need for active water management programs. Access to sufficiently clean water has an impact on social and cultural justice, ecological sustainability and commercial benefits. We are therefore introducing water management programs at all facilities that are prone to water risk and are reducing the volume of medicines left in production wastewater; we require our suppliers to do the same. Our production facility in Xochimilco (Mexico) has a valid Alliance Water Stewardship (AWS) certification. In 2019, Boehringer Ingelheim was the first pharmaceutical company worldwide to receive certification according to this globally recognized standard. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an increasingly serious threat to global public health and requires action at every level of government as well as by businesses and society at large. For this reason, Boehringer Ingelheim joined the AMR Industry Alliance – one of the largest private coalitions established to offer sustainable solutions for combating antimicrobial resistance.
Initiatives: Clean Water, Resource Use and Responsible Value Chain