Pharmaceuticals enable modern healthcare by helping to prevent, manage, and cure disease, but growing demand is increasing their impact on the environment. For oral drug delivery, medicines must be designed with the full life cycle in mind, using robust data to balance environmental performance with safety, efficacy, quality, and accessibility.
Life cycle assessments (LCAs) help make sustainability measurable by identifying environmental hotspots, comparing improvement options, and providing transparent product-level data for customer discussions. In this interview, Lucas Cusin, global technical marketing manager for Oral Drug Delivery Solutions at Evonik Health Care, explains the importance of LCA data and how it creates value for customers.
Q1. Why is sustainability becoming more important in oral drug delivery?
Lucas: The core priorities of pharmaceutical companies remain safety, efficacy, quality, and regulatory reliability. However, customers are increasingly looking at the environmental impact of the full value chain, including excipients, manufacturing, and logistics. Scope 3 emissions – the indirect emissions that occur upstream and downstream of a company - are difficult to reduce unless transparent data is available. Product-level data helps customers better understand these emissions and make informed decisions.
Q2. What role do life cycle assessments (LCAs) play in making sustainability more concrete?
Lucas: LCAs help turn sustainability ambitions into concrete goals. Evaluating environmental impacts across a product’s life cycle — including raw materials, transportation, production, use, and end-of-life considerations — helps identify hotspots, compare options, and provide a transparent basis for decision-making. Auditable, externally validated data builds trust and supports credible discussions.
Q3. What did Evonik learn from the LCA work on EUDRAGIT® L 100-55?
Lucas: At Evonik, we recently completed an auditable update of the LCA for our EUDRAGIT® L 100-55 polymer. The work confirmed that optimizing our production setup contributed to a lower environmental footprint while maintaining the high quality standards our customers expect. More importantly, it reinforced a broader lesson: when sustainability is embedded in everyday operational and business decisions, it can drive meaningful, measurable improvements over time. This is an important milestone, but also part of a continuous improvement journey guided by data, transparency, and learning.
Q4. Which measures contributed to the reduced global warming potential?
Lucas: The improvement came from several measures: an optimized spray drying setup, reduced transport between production sites, renewable electricity at our site in Darmstadt, Germany, and the ongoing qualification of more sustainable raw materials. The LCA helped us to understand which levers have the greatest measurable impact. It also demonstrated that opportunities for further environmental improvement can still be identified, even for a product that has been a trusted industry standard for decades.
Q5. Why does product-level sustainability data matter for customers?
Lucas: Customers need reliable data to support sustainability reporting, procurement, supplier assessments, and ESG commitments. Product-level information helps them move beyond general claims and understand the environmental profile of formulation materials. In line with Benign-by-Design principles, it also supports more informed excipient selection during development, helping teams consider sustainability alongside performance and regulatory requirements when designing future-ready drug products.
Q6. How can customers access and use the LCA information?
Lucas: Audited LCA-based information will be available through product sustainability reports or concise brochures for selected products, including EUDRAGIT® L 100-55. Beyond providing documentation, we actively engage with customers because sustainability is built on collaboration and shared learning. These discussions help us better understand our customers’ priorities and challenges, enabling us to continuously adapt our support and provide the most relevant sustainability information and insights.
Q7. How does Evonik balance sustainability improvements with supply security?
Lucas: In pharmaceutical applications, sustainability must never come at the expense of quality, performance, regulatory reliability, or supply security. For spray-dried EUDRAGIT® L 100-55, Evonik continues to maintain dual sourcing, helping to ensure that improved environmental performance does not create new risks for customers.
Q8. How does this approach fit with the overall sustainability strategy for Evonik Health Care?
Lucas: EUDRAGIT® L 100-55 is one proof point in our move toward data-driven sustainability. This approach is driven by goals to achieve climate neutrality in Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and reduce Scope 3 emissions by 2030. LCAs help identify hotspots and improvements. Over time, the aim is to expand product-level sustainability transparency across selected parts of the portfolio.
Q9. What is the key takeaway for pharmaceutical companies?
Lucas: Sustainability in oral drug delivery is becoming more measurable and actionable. The value of LCA data is not only a lower footprint number, but the transparency it creates for better decisions and collaboration. Companies that combine proven performance, quality, supply reliability, and credible sustainability data will be better positioned to meet evolving expectations.
Learn more about Evonik’s EUDRAGIT® portfolio and how product-level sustainability data can support your oral drug delivery strategy.
