A new CEN Workshop is being planned which will complement the activities of the EU project 'ETERNAL'. The aim of this project is to contribute to the safe and sustainable development of pharmaceutical manufacture, use and disposal.
It is not easy to make decisions about comparative sustainability during the early stages of chemical or biochemical process development. The quality of the data may be uncertain and multiple route options might be present for consideration. Moreover, a full life cycle assessment (LCA) typically requires a significant investment of time and resources.
Sustainability is a complex topic for project teams that need to answer the question early on of “which alternatives are most likely to turn out to be the most sustainable?”. This is not helped by the lack of appropriate decision-making criteria. It is this problem that this CEN Workshop will concentrate on in light of the work already done by Britest’s Framework for Early-Stage Sustainability Assessments (FESSA). In combination with the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tool and computed uncertainty range (CURE) calculation method, the two-level system developed by FESSA will be used as a facilitation aid with teams seeking to make an assessment of the relative sustainability credentials of different process options at an early stage of a project (pre-LCA).
In this system, three pillars of sustainability are central: Environmental impact, Social impact and Economic impact. These are coupled with two further top-level criteria: Technical Feasibility and Supply Chain Feasibility. In terms of the sustainable performance of processes, two key areas are identified: mass intensity and energy efficiency. The overall methodology is derived within the framework of the ETERNAL green pharmaceutical manufacturing EU project and is foreseen to be transferable to other manufacturing industries.
The kick-off meeting for the Workshop will be an online meeting and is planned to take place via Microsoft Teams on 19th June 2025 from 10.00 am to 12.00 pm (CEST). To attend, please use this link.
All interested parties are invited to submit comments on the draft Project Plan using the commenting form below, to the Workshop Secretary, Teresa Sanchez Segura (tsanchez@une.org), by June 5th, 2025.
Download the documents:
