Envirotainer protects pharmaceuticals more sustainably with Cloud for Sustainability

Moving medicines while reducing greenhouse gas emissions 

For 40 years, Envirotainer’s innovative temperature-controlled solutions have supported the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies in ensuring the safety and efficacy of medicines for patients. Transporting these products by air is a complex process, with focus needed on ensuring the reliability of solutions while minimizing the environmental footprint of every shipment. Although sustainability at every level has been a priority from operations to its entire value chain, Envirotainer recently committed to the ambitious Science Based Targets, validated by theScience Based Targets Initiative. The company believes this commitment will help reduce not only its own emissions but also those of its customers.

It’s no easy feat: the company must track data from its 100-plus global network stations and the interactions with 600 pharmaceutical customers, 100 airline partners, 40 freight forwarder partners, and suppliers of goods and services.

Powering pharmaceutical delivery with rich data

“The data is rich and complex,” says Nadja Lourenço, Head of Sustainability and Governance at Envirotainer. “It’s a challenge to navigate the data so that it can not only contribute to our sustainability journey, but also our customers’.And we must be transparent with the data.”

That’s whereMicrosoft Sustainability Manager, a solution withinMicrosoft Cloud for Sustainability, comes in. It offers organizations an accurate, comprehensive, and real-time view into their environmental footprint across all their emissions. This allows Envirotainer to measure and report across the value chain and use insights to identifyreduction strategies to reach net zero by 2050.Envirotainer chose these technologies because of the shared sustainability values with Microsoft.The company also trusts Microsoft cloud services due to its robust security controls, monitoring, and protections.

Envirotainer’s goal is to ensure data quality while also reducing the time to gather data and use it to inform business objectives, moving from manual inputs to automation to focus on improvements and make quicker decisions. The company collects data from sensors withAzure IoT, which is then stored inAzure Data Lake. With Sustainability Manager, the Envirotainer team can view its emissions footprint and track sustainability goals with the solution. It uses the solution’s capability for deep analysis to better understand data and improve techniques for reducing emissions and contributing effectively to its Science Based Targets.

“Being relevant as a company and relevant in the whole value chain in the future means strong sustainability targets and backing that up with data,” says Otto Dyberg, CIO at Envirotainer.  

“Instead of searching for where the data is and what kind of format it has, I can now search for logical questions to ask the data stored,” says Bjorn Ronnmark, Fleet Process Manager at Envirotainer. “With Sustainability Manager, we now have more precisedata to focus our effort to maximize impact. It makes decision-making faster because we can align as a company as we all have the same view. We pull up the analysis and can all make the same conclusions.” 

“Microsoft helps provide this data in this whole chain from manufacturing to the end user, and that is essential,” says Camilla Engbrink, CTO at Envirotainer.

Building a more sustainable future with fast data 

Sustainability Manager gives Envirotainer an easy way to drill down on the factors it is monitoring. “If we change something about how we reposition containers, what effect will that have on emissions?” asks Lourenço. “In Sustainability Manager, we can track our production and energy usage reductions and the percentage used from renewable resources per facility.Sustainability Manager now gives us the possibility to drill down into specific areas and details much more efficiently, as well as track trends over time.”

Transparency, reducing costs and waste,building trust, and controlling data are other reasons that Envirotainer chose Sustainability Manager. It plans to use Sustainability Manager data on designing and producing its solutions more sustainably, reducing movement of empty containers, and more.

With faster data comes faster action—essential for the timely delivery of life-saving medicines and vaccines. Making a positive, sustainable impact on a global scale is at the heart of this mission. With Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and Envirotainer’s expertise and commitment, this is only the beginning. 

Find out more aboutEnvirotainer onYouTube andLinkedIn.