What’s required to set targets for circularity in pharma?

Novo Nordisk is a leading healthcare company driving change to fight diabetes and other chronic diseases around the World. They produce and distribute more than 600 million pen devices yearly, serving patients in more than 170 countries. This puts Novo Nordisk at the front line of some of today’s biggest challenges: Resource scarcity, CO2 emissions and waste.

The pressing question for the responsible team in Novo is how to ensure the business can continue to grow and help more patients, while minimising waste and ultimately succeed with Novo Nordisk’s target of net zero emissions across the entire value chain by 2045 at the latest.

We partnered up with circular economy expert Sara Wingstrand to guide Novo Nordisk through a workshop exploring what it entails to be a circular economy champion, what targets can look like short, medium and long term and what has to be in place to deliver and ensure accountability.

What we did

We kicked of the workshop with a helicopter view on best practice showing examples of businesses that: 1/ Set out to regenerate rather than simply reduce negative impact, 2/ are set up for success with clear targets, an active innovation culture and patient capital, and 3/ don’t try to greenwash themselves to goodwill but communicate transparently on progress, set-backs and learnings along the way.

With deep expert knowledge available from Sara we mapped the landscape of targets differentiating downstream targets from the targets that drive radical innovation and long-term reduction and specified the international standards for how to measure and report.

‍Outcome

We inspired the team and provided our ideas for short, medium and long term targets and levers.