Industry White Paper on the Responsible Use of Water

Responsibility

Mar 22, 2024 | 4 min read

March 22 is World Water Day, a global initiative to raise awareness of the importance of water and the need to conserve it. Together with industry partners, Sartorius contributed to a guide for water stewardship in the biopharma industry.

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Biopharmaceutical manufacturing, especially the production of monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, is a water-intensive process. The need for clean water runs through the entire value chain: it starts with the production of consumables such as filters and sterile bags to the cleaning of equipment and the preparation of media and buffer solutions. That's why industry players, including Sartorius, are working together to take action and conserve water.

An industry commitment on water

A team of industry experts, including representatives from Roche, AstraZeneca, Rockwell Automation, Pfizer as well as Sartorius have joined forces to promote water conservation in the biopharmaceutical industry. Together with BioPhorum, a global industry association of companies operating in the biopharmaceutical sector, they published a white paper in the ambition to foster collaboration between all stakeholders in the sector and to develop new solutions jointly by sharing best practices.

In addition to providing information on responsible water management and sharing available resources for the sector, this paper focuses on the water stewardship approach, that aims to enable companies to act on two dimensions:

Continue to innovate and drive efficiencies in water use; and design out pollution throughout the process.
Broaden the understanding of connections to local water supply by considering the impacts and dependencies that facilities have on freshwater as a shared resource.

A case for shifting to water stewardship in the biopharma sector

Download White Paper

Water projects at our sites

At Sartorius, water is primarily used in membrane production and modification. Teams at our sites have realized different projects as one of the focal points of the company’s environmental sustainability strategy is to continuously improve recycling rates and the management of solvent residues in wastewater. Two examples illustrate the diverse approaches:

At the site in Bangalore, India, the team implemented several steps – reaching from the reuse of water to collecting rainwater and water recycling - which led to a reduction in water consumption of more than 30%.

In 2022, Sartorius built and installed four distillation columns at the production site Yauco in Puerto Rico. The almost closed solvent circle leads to a solvent recovery rate of more than 90%. More than 11 million liters of water are processed for reuse. Similar systems and nearly closed solvent circles are also in place at the headquarter in Göttingen.

Innovative technologies save water in customers' production processes

In their production processes, biopharma manufacturers can save water with the use of innovative technologies. For example, single-use products eliminate the need for extensive cleaning procedures after each batch - reducing a production facilities water usage by up to 80% compared to a traditional stainless-steel process. Technologies for process intensification also enable customers to save water, particularly in downstream processes.

Learn more about how Sartorius products help to reduce the environmental footprint of the biopharma industry in the Sustainability in Bioprocessing Whitepaper.

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