Pharma
LCA Consortium
The Pharmaceutical Life-Cycle Assessment Consortium (“Pharma LCA”) came together under the banner of PEG and the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Health Systems Taskforce.
News
The Pharmaceutical LCA Consortium is proud to announce the publication of PAS 2090:2025 – Pharmaceutical Products: Product Category Rules for Environmental Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), the first international standard providing a harmonised framework to measure and communicate the environmental impact of medicines across their entire lifecycle.
The standard was developed through an independent, multi-stakeholder consensus process led by BSI and sponsored by NHS England, the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) and the Pharmaceutical LCA Consortium which came together working with the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Health Systems Task Force and the Pharmaceutical Environment Group (PEG).
This milestone supports the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Health Systems Task Force commitment to align on a common LCA framework and comes at a pivotal moment as healthcare systems worldwide work to reduce their environmental footprint.
Why PAS 2090 is a major milestone:
- Offers a globally applicable, consistent and flexible approach to LCA for pharmaceutical products.
- Enables companies at different stages of data maturity to measure, understand, and reduce environmental impacts.
- Facilitates better information-sharing with healthcare providers, regulators, and investors on a common harmonised method to transfer pharma industry environmental optimisation.
The standard was shaped by input from over 475 stakeholders across 35 countries, including academia, health systems, regulators, aid organizations for access to medicine programs, consultancies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers – spanning innovative, generic, and tier 1 suppliers.
In addition, the PharmaLCA Consortium has developed a technical guidance document which will support PAS 2090 implementation by providing practical recommendations and illustrative examples.
To further accelerate LCA adoption, the PharmaLCA Consortium is developing two key initiatives:
- A PAS 2090-compliant Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database tailored to the pharmaceutical sector, in collaboration with ecoinvent and Boehringer Ingelheim. The first release, comprising 186 regionalised datasets, is planned for publication by Q4 2025 and will be accessible via ecoinvent.
- A PAS 2090-compliant LCA tool aiming to be available in November 2026, with a minimum viable product expected by May 2026.
What can your organization do to prepare for PAS 2090?
- Upskill your teams with PSCI’s LCA training.
- Inform relevant teams in your organisation about PAS 2090.
- Prepare for future procurement and regulatory requirements.
Together, these initiatives will make LCA more accessible for the pharmaceutical industry, especially small and mid-sized companies and procurement authorities, and support the transformation towards a more environmentally sustainable healthcare system.
Resources
Members
The Consortium was formally launched on November 1st, 2023, and consists of eleven members:
Purpose
The Consortium’s purpose is to facilitate a universal approach to assessing the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products. This should enable pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders, including payers, to make informed choices about product development and patient care. The Consortium’s outputs will be freely accessible to all pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders.
The Consortium is working to:
Develop
Develop pharmaceutical Product Category Rules to enable robust, comparable product LCAs in pharma;
Improve
Improve product inventory data to enable more accurate LCA for pharmaceutical products;
Create
Create a tool to support the implementation of the PCR across the sector and by non-LCA experts;
Engage
Engage with stakeholders to support the recognition, acceptance, and uptake of the PCR approach developed.
Establish
Establish a sector-wide standard for medicines LCA with NHS England and the British Standards Institution (BSI).
Contact
SLR Consulting provides the Project Management Office (PMO) for the Pharma LCA Consortium.
Please contact Daniel Witte if you would like to learn more.
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