Putting Sustainability to Work in Pharma

Sustainability efforts have become a part of the pharmaceutical manufacturing landscape and play into regulatory requirements for environmental assessments.1-3 Driven by multiple factors, such as supply chains, regulations, and consumer expectations, actions to reduce emissions and responsible sourcing have entered into product design.4 Ingredient selection, packaging material choice, and supply chain decisions all play a role in a sustainable manufacturing.

In 2026, Informa Markets is introducing the Sustainability Summit to CPHI Milan, which is being held from October 6-8, to help those working in drug development and manufacturing better navigate the sustainability landscape. PharmTech spoke with Silvia Forroova, director of Partnerships & Sustainability at CPHI, and founder of the CPHI Sustainability Collective, about the new Sustainability Summit and how it can help organizations meeting their sustainability goals.

PharmTech: What key challenges are pharmaceutical companies facing today in trying to make their sustainability initiatives commercially viable, not just environmentally sound?

Forroova: The biggest challenge I see a lot of times is sustainability gets treated as a cost and not as an investment. And, what I hear when I talk to pharma leaders, and all of this is fair as well, is that there are regulatory complexity and short-term financial pressures within organizations, supply chain opacity, and very much also lack of standardized metrics.

The companies really winning now are the ones reframing sustainability as risk mitigation and competitive advantage and kind of focusing on that co-creation with, for example, their supplier groups, looking at tools to apply and compare with peers and partners to see how they can find ways to work together and thinking about medium-to-long-term strategy around sustainability and resilience and value creation around their businesses.

Why is knowledge sharing among pharmaceutical stakeholders so critical to advancing sustainability initiatives industry-wide, and what gaps currently exist in how that knowledge gets exchanged?

I think the reality is that sustainability in pharma isn’t a competitive advantage anymore.

It’s an imperative, and regulators like the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), now require environmental risk assessments as part of product authorizations.

And investors are considering and sometimes scrutinizing Scope 3 emissions within organizations and companies in the industry, and patients and healthcare systems are demanding greener medicines.

So, knowledge is still fragmented, and sometimes companies are trying to reinvent the wheel.

I really have seen gaps in data collection and sharing. There is a lot of talk about supplier engagement, cross-functional collaboration, really getting the buy-in from different parts of the pharmaceutical businesses.

And so more than ever before, I think sharing, collaborating, and co-creating are critical for the industry.

What role can a Summit like this play in helping organizations move from sustainability ambition to measurable, commercially viable solutions?

This is where events like the CPHI Sustainability Summit become gamechangers. We are not here to talk about why sustainability matters anymore. Everyone knows that. We're here to tackle the how.

And the summit, does three things, well. CPHI is the place known for bringing buyers and suppliers together and bringing together wonderful community and different parts of the supply chain. And so, the summit, first, creates a safe space for honest conversations, and that's where real innovation and collaboration happen.

Secondly, it also connects dots across the value chain because you have different parts of the value chain present at CPHI. This year, we are expecting 60 to 70,000 people at the 3-day exhibition, and so you've got your key players there, and you've got green chemistry experts. You have packaging innovators, supply chain strategists, and regulatory specialists all in these rooms at the event.

And, the third piece is really about accountability, taking the learnings, connections back to your business and applying them, that we will do via, for example, hackathon at the event.

So, you know, we are really trying to create something that is beyond a conference, and it's really about creating spaces for these conversations that lead to action being taken.

How can a forum like the Summit help bridge the gap between sustainability planning and practical, on-the-ground implementation?

I have been saying this for a while, and I keep to this. We did not want to create a conference where you go into sessions, and you leave and you've heard some fantastic stuff. The summit won’t be a lecture series. It is a working session. We’ve designed it around the pillars of peer learning and meeting with people you want to meet, matchmaking style, and actionable frameworks.

And I think also the secret sauce will be follow-up. So, the Sustainability Collective, for example, doesn’t end when the summit does. We’ll follow up with reports and updates via the Sustainability Collective for our members, so the community can really carry on the good work and apply what they heard from peers on stage and while networking at the event, and I think that's how you can move from planning to implementation.

We really want to ensure that people leave with key takeaways of each session that they can bring back to their jobs, their businesses, their work with partners.

What does success look like in terms of measurable outcomes coming out of an event like this, and how should organizations track progress after they leave?

I think success for the summit is about what changed after the delegates and attendees left in their businesses and in the industry as well, whether that is immediate outcomes and adoption of shared frameworks or looking at medium-term outcomes such as reductions in their scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, cost savings around waste reduction, energy efficiency or circular packaging, for example. [There are] longer-term outcomes as well when it comes to regulatory compliance ahead of mandates, market differentiation through sustainability leadership, thought leadership in general, and industry-wide adoption of best practices, pioneered, shared, spoken of at the summit, then being taken further into the pharma industry.

Across manufacturing, supply chains, packaging, and green chemistry, where do you see the greatest opportunity for the Summit to help translate sustainability ambitions into tangible business outcomes?

The delegates will be able to join diverse sessions focusing on anything from green chemistry to data to packaging to sustainable clinical trials, and many more. And consideration application, of course, depends on the industry actors themselves.

We know that strides are being taken in many areas and parts of the supply chain already, and we've been working with, amazing, thought leading organizations via the Sustainability Collective, such as PSCI, BioPhorum, Alliance to Zero, My Green Lab, HPRC, CiPPPA, and many more.

My humble recommendation is that if you are a pharma sustainability practitioner, decision-maker, or influencing decisions within your organizations, the summit is the place to meet your peers old and new and really hear from industry experts and giants on the latest of what's happening in pharma sustainability.

So, you can take it back to your work. You can consider, discuss, plan, strategize, get investment and apply after the summit. I really feel that the pharma industry has been in the last handful of years at an inflection point, and sustainability is a regulatory, financial, and reputational necessity.

It really belongs to that resilience piece for the industry and for the organizations within. And so, we designed the summit to enable exactly this and turning ambition into action and action into measurable business outcomes.

References

1. Environmental risk assessment of medicinal products for human use - Scientific guideline. European Medicines Agency. Accessed August 11, 2026. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/environmental-risk-assessment-medicinal-products-human-use-scientific-guideline#current-version-effective-from-1092024-7647
2. Environmental Assessment of Human Drug and Biologics Applications. Guidance for Industry. FDA. July 1998. https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/environmental-assessment-human-drug-and-biologics-applications
3. Sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry. ABPI. Accessed August 11, 2026. https://www.abpi.org.uk/reputation/sustainability-in-the-pharmaceutical-industry/
4. Lin L and Devadas P. Strengthening sustainability through smarter ingredients: designing resource-efficient formulations. PharmTech. Ingredient Innovations eBook. March 28, 2026. https://www.pharmtech.com/view/strengthening-sustainability-through-smarter-ingredients-designing-resource-efficient-formulations

About the Speaker

Silvia Forroova is the director of Partnerships & Sustainability for the CPHI portfolio at Informa Markets. With more than 18 years of experience in global events, she specializes in strategic partnerships within the pharmaceutical industry.

Silvia leads sustainability initiatives across the CPHI portfolio of events, developing strategies that drive positive environmental impact for trade events and the wider pharmaceutical industry. She is also the founder of the Sustainability Collective, an impact network that brings together change-makers from across the pharmaceutical industry to foster collaboration, share insights, and drive tangible progress on sustainability challenges.