Sanofi, Novartis among Time’s most sustainable companies

Pharma giants Sanofi and Novartis came in at No. 7 and 17, respectively, in Time magazine’s “Most Sustainable Companies of 2024” rankings.

Overall, nearly 40 of the 500 companies on the list fell under the category of Chemicals, Drugs & Biotechnology. Other large pharma companies making it into the top half of the 500 included Novo Nordisk (No. 27), Merck & Co. (No. 28), AstraZeneca (No. 83), Takeda Pharmaceuticals (No. 85), Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany (No. 129), Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (No. 143), AbbVie (No. 145), UCB (No. 159), Daiichi Sankyo (No. 186), and Chugai Pharmaceutical (No. 228).

Time said of its report: “It’s one thing for a company to give lip service to helping the environment; it’s another for its leaders to make trackable, public commitments to doing better for the planet—and follow through on them.”

The magazine worked with data firm Statista on the methodology for the sustainable companies ranking. Here’s more from Time on how it worked with Statista to create the report:

“The companies at the top of the list have signed on to some of the most respected climate programs, including the 1.5°C target from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and receive high scores from CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). TIME and Statista further held companies to high standards for their Scope 1 and 2 emissions and energy consumption relative to company size, emissions reductions in 2021 and 2022 (the most recent years fully reported), and proportion of renewable energy used by the company’s operations. (Scope 1 emissions are directly caused by a company; Scope 2 are indirectly created when a company purchases power.) And, perhaps most importantly, many of the top companies have incorporated sustainability into their business models.”

Sustainability has become an important goal for a wide variety of companies as climate change threats continue to grow. Pharma often doesn’t get a lot of attention when it comes to sustainability. However, the industry accounts for 4.4% of global emissions, according to the World Economic Forum.

“There’s a tremendous amount of urgency to move the needle forward,” Mike Dieterich, who was at the time senior director of sustainability at CRB, told Pharmaceutical Processing World last year. “The threat of climate change is ever-present, and if there ever was a time to act, it’s now.”