Protecting the planet while serving patients

At UCB, we are committed to making medicines for people living with severe diseases – but we also strive to  minimize our ecological  footprint  by actively engaging management, employees and stakeholders in 7 areas of engagement: ensuring regulatory compliance,  responsibly using natural resources, enhancing energy efficiency while minimizing carbon footprint,  promoting green chemistry, controlling emissions, actively managing waste streams and applying greener life-cycle management principles.

This spirit of working in an environmentally responsible way was seen recently during UCB’s Global Green Planet Day.

We took the opportunity to remind all our employees that they have an important role to play in reducing UCB’s ecological footprint at our sites around the world. As part of the Green Planet Challenge, we encouraged our staff to suggest ways that our company can make smarter use of  energy and water or avoid waste.

We are also applying this principle of sustainability when making important decisions about staff travel and distribution of our medicines. A global company like ours makes thousands of choices every day. To me, that means thousands of opportunities to do the right thing.

This is not simply an annual feel-good call to action: our drive towards a more sustainable way of doing business is yielding tangible results.

• In 2013 UCB saved 2% of our annual energy usage by implementing energy saving projects
• 50% of the electricity we use comes from renewable sources
• Four UCB sites fully rely on green electricity: i.e. Bulle (Switzerland), Monheim (Germany), Braine and Anderlecht (Belgium)
• We recovered/reused almost 94 % of our waste – an 8 % improvement on 2010
• We recycled more than 40% of our waste.
  

We still can do better – and we will. For UCB, a more intelligent – greener – approach to doing business makes sense ecologically, socially and economically. Everyone here is invited to play their part.