Multi-stakeholder consensus has enabled progress towards a more sustainable healthcare and life sciences sector.
1 December, 2025 – The world’s first global standard offering a harmonized, practical framework to measure and assess the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products throughout their lifecycle has been published by BSI. This standard aims to enhance the quality and consistency of product environmental impact reporting from pharmaceutical manufacturers, which could be used to respond to requests from financial investment communities, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders. This will improve transparency and support the assessment and reduction of the environmental impact of medicines across their manufacture, supply, use and end of product life.
Pharmaceutical Products – Product Category Rules for Environmental Life Cycle Assessments (PAS 2090:2025) offers a consistent, flexible and globally applicable approach to life cycle assessment (LCA), with the aim of improving the understanding and information sharing of the environmental impacts of medicines and effective tool to execute environmentally optimised drug designs and manufacturing. The standard, published by BSI in its capacity as the UK national standards body, aims to support companies in calculating, understanding, and reducing the environmental footprint of their products.
The initiative complements wider sustainability targets set by industry, regulators and healthcare providers in response to healthcare’s growing environmental footprint1.
PAS 2090 allows organisations at different stages of data maturity to meaningfully assess and report on environmental impacts of pharmaceutical products. It does not require primary data for activities outside of a company’s operational control, making it appropriate for all segments of the industry from generic, innovative, and the global suppliers.
The development process was a multi-stakeholder consensus-building process, including extensive input from academia, health systems, regulators, aid organizations focussed on access to medicines, consultancies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Its publication follows engagement from over 475 stakeholders across 35 countries through a digital hub and over 400 comments in public consultation in June 2025 —showing the true global nature of the standard’s relevance. This PAS standard is voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply it or comply with it.
The standard was supported by NHS England, the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) and the Pharmaceutical LCA Consortium which is a collaboration between with the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Health Systems Task Force and the Pharmaceutical Environment Group (PEG). The launch of PAS 2090 supports the SMI Health Systems Task Force’s commitment to align on a common LCA framework for the pharmaceutical industry.
Susan Taylor Martin, Chief Executive, BSI, said: “PAS 2090 sets a new global benchmark for environmental transparency in the pharmaceutical sector. Developed through robust, multi-stakeholder collaboration, it offers a practical and flexible framework that pharmaceutical organizations of all sizes can use to better understand and reduce the environmental impact of their products. At BSI, we’re proud to support this critical step in accelerating progress to a more sustainable world.”
Office for Life Sciences Executive Chair, Steve Bates OBE, said: "It is great to see BSI working with leading industry players and trade associations including AstraZeneca, GSK, Sanofi, Novo Nordisk and Medicines for Europe to develop a standard that could be adopted globally on how to measure the life-cycle emissions of pharmaceutical products.
"The UK has a proud history of analytical science and setting standards and I’m delighted that this detailed work developed through collaboration between industry, academia, and governments from around the world is bearing fruit."
Paul Hudson, Chief Executive Officer, Sanofi, and Member of the Sustainable Markets Health Systems Task Force, said: “PAS 2090 marks a defining moment for sustainable healthcare and is a testament to how collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem can drive meaningful progress. This new standard gives our industry a common framework to measure and reduce the environmental footprint of our medicines and vaccines. True patient care means protecting not just individual health, but the health of our planet – and this standard helps us to do both.”
Claire Foreman, Director of Medicines Policy & Strategy at NHS England said: “This new standard, developed in collaboration with the life sciences sector and academia, will help to measure the environmental impact of medicines while helping the NHS to improve treatment options for patients on a sustainable footing.”
Claire Lund, Vice President, Sustainability, GSK said: “As part of the Steering Group, we welcome this new standard as a significant step forward in improving the environmental sustainability of medicines and vaccines. Developed through collaboration across the healthcare sector, PAS 2090 provides the consistency and transparency health systems need to help decarbonise care, while giving companies a practical framework to understand and reduce their product footprints. Ultimately, it will also help strengthen the resilience of the global supply chains that patients and healthcare providers rely on.”
To download the standard, visit: here
To accelerate adoption of the standard, the PharmaLCA Consortium is independently developing three key initiatives:
- A technical guidance document, which will support PAS 2090 implementation by providing practical recommendations and illustrative examples.
- 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 over 180 regionalized 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.
Together, these initiatives will make LCA significantly more accessible for the pharmaceutical industry, especially to small and mid-sized companies, as well as procurement authorities and other healthcare actors.
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