Product Stewardship

Product Stewardship at Roche aims at minimizing the health, safety, environmental and social impacts of a product, device or service. It covers the products lifecycle and actively encourages all stakeholders, such as suppliers, retailers and consumers to take on the responsibility of minimizing the impact of the product.

Our internal guidelines and directives are aimed at continuously reducing the impact of our business operations on the environment. Similarly, we maintain an information system specifically designed to help manage our environmental activities which, together with a library and document system, provide support in important areas of environmental protection.

The safe handling, processing and supply of pharmaceuticals, active pharmaceutical ingredients, intermediates, other chemicals and bio-materials is heavily regulated. This special legislation includes the European Union’s REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) and CLP (Classification, Labelling and Packaging) regulations. Roche is among those leading the implementation of these requirements and actively participating in the development of new legislation.

Legislation calls for safety data sheets for all chemicals and bio-materials handled at a Roche site. These documents include information such as hazard data and waste disposal guidance. For our proprietary substances, we elaborate these documents and make them available online as a means of communicating the hazardous properties of these materials to employees, customers and the public.

Transport safety. We publish guidelines, maintain controls and establish internal policies to ensure that the transport of all goods, and dangerous goods in particular, complies with international regulations.

We conduct environmental risk assessments to determine the impacts of particular chemical and bio-materials on the environment. We also elaborate these documents for active pharmaceutical ingredients as part of a new drug application.

Roche supports the principles of resource stewardship defined in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its three main objectives covering the conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components, and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of genetic resources.

We avoid the use of non-commodity natural resource materials as a source for products or the discovery and development of pharmaceuticals. If, however, we discover or develop a commercial product derived from natural plant, microbial or animal genetic materials, our use of those resources will be guided by the principles and goals of the CBD.

We do not operate facilities in areas that are protected or have high biodiversity values.

Green and safe logistics is an area of increasing focus within our supply chain. To ensure safe transportation and to help reduce air emissions, energy consumption and waste throughout the Group, we have implemented a green logistics strategy to maximise use of the cargo space as means of reducing traffic.

Freight transport poses a major challenge in terms of environmental impacts. To be more sustainable, transport needs to have little or no environmental impact.

We have introduced Group-wide efforts, such as:

• switching from short-haul flights to specially refrigerated trucks

• implementing sea-freight lanes from supply hubs in Germany and the US

• reusing or recycling packaging materials

• preventing uncontrolled loss of cooling energy from our warehouses

• building or refurbishing warehouses to meet the latest energy efficiency standards

• selecting transportation companies that train drivers to drive efficiently and use vehicles that meet low-emission standards