Assessing the sustainability of a manufacturing process using life cycle assessment technique—a case of an Indian pharmaceutical company

Abstract

Manufacturing organizations are under continuous pressure to implement sustainability in their activities. There is a need to identify the environmental hotspots in the manufacturing processes of the products. In this research life cycle assessment technique has been used to achieve the objective of identifying the maximum impact-generating processes in the production of a pharmaceutical product named ‘Paracetamol tablet.’ The study identifies the environmental impacts of the paracetamol tablet manufacturing in the endpoint and midpoint impact categories. Three main environmental hotspot processes are identified during this study. The midpoint assessment results show that the ‘blister packing’ is the top environmental hotspot owing to the consumption of resources of the packaging material. ‘Blister packing’ has a significant contribution to the seven impact categories. Blister packaging has more than 70% environmental impact in freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity categories. The packaging for the tablet mainly consists of the PVC and aluminum blister, which cause a lot of environmental impact during their production. The ‘Blister packing’ process is followed by the ‘sieving process,’ which has more than 80% contribution in land use and metal depletion impact category. To reduce the impacts arising during the ‘sieving’ process will require improvements in the electricity mix, such as increasing the renewable component in the mix. The third hotspot process is ‘steam production,’ which shows its presence in almost all the categories varying from 8% to 50%. More efficient ways of steam production like solar-based steam generation will make steam production more environmentally viable. The robustness of the results has been verified using the sensitivity analysis. Possible solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of the hotspot processes have been provided.