Shire Facilities Divert 66% of Total Waste to Landfill

Our focus on how we use resources improves efficiency, creates less waste, and reduces risks and impacts on the environment and our local communities.

Water is particularly important, given its essential role in manufacturing and link to energy use. Throughout 2016, we continued to explore and implement water conservation projects, Company-wide.

Southern California recently experienced a major and prolonged drought, which led to water becoming more expensive and less accessible over time. In this region, we completed two major water conservation projects. The first was in our Los Angeles manufacturing facility, where we saved approximately 19,000m3 of water, delivering financial savings of nearly $320,000 in 2016. We achieved this by reducing water flushing within the Central Utility Building from 20 to five minutes, and developing a water-tracking tool that helps identify additional reduction opportunities by showing how and where water is used.

Secondly, at our Thousand Oaks facility, we upgraded our reverse osmosis water treatment system to improve efficiency, and introduced drought-tolerant plants around the site. Over a two-year period, these and other water-saving efforts have reduced the site’s annual water consumption from 352,000m3 to 201,000m3 , a 43 percent reduction.

Overall, in 2016 we consumed 4,216,000m3 of water in our operations — 3,949,000m3 from municipal supplies and 267,000m3 from on-site sources.

We continue to look for waste-reduction opportunities, prioritizing our efforts on high-volume waste streams and facilities that produce the most waste or have particularly strong improvement potential.

Since 2014, our BioLife team has actively engaged with a key supplier to address their packaging waste. Through this partnership, the supplier has committed to replace a non-recyclable plastic tray with a cardboard insert in early 2017. This material substitution will eliminate near 50 metric tons (108,000lbs) of waste from going to landfill and increase the amount of corrugated material recycled by our BioLife operations.

In 2016, we generated 23,210 metric tons of waste and our landfill diversion rate was 66 percent. In total, we recycled approximately 13,830 metric tons of waste that would have otherwise been sent to landfill.

Read more about Shire's commitment to sustainability in the 2016 Annual Responsibility Review.