Our Environmental Sustainability Strategy Sets Ambitious Goals
We believe it is possible to grow our business and provide quality products to pharma companies across the world, while at the same time protecting the resources we need for the future and safeguarding the environment. However, we also realize that we won’t be able to meet this ambition unless we focus on the key environmental sustainability issues across our whole value chain from acquiring raw materials, through product manufacture, distribution, use and disposal of product.
We have made significant improvements in the existing effluent treatment plant with extensive instrumented safety protection systems. These helped to reduce the environmental burden and recycling of the treated effluent. This helps us to achieve the status of “zero liquid discharge”.
An area of immediate priority is reducing the emissions from our own operations. As part of this effort, we have switched our coal-burning boiler to using briquette or biomass as a fuel in our manufacturing facility. This strategy has dramatically reduced our carbon emissions and has also helped build local economies by creating a market for waste that previously had limited value. In addition to this, we have also installed a scrubber system to reduce gas emission in the environment.
We regularly keep targets to reduce water consumption at our manufacturing facility. We work at the site-level in our operations to identify any opportunities to reduce water usage. We also have a drainage network which ensures that steam converted water is channelized and collected in a hot water collection tank .This water is reused again for the boiler and through these measures we manage to save water as well as fuel at the same time.
Our target is to avoid creating any waste from our operation that has no further use. That is why we have set a target of zero operational waste. Innovations drive down waste in many ways. For example, recycling of solvent in operation, recovery of solvent, reuse of container and other such measures manage to reduce waste. Alta also focuses on other areas such as minimizing the use of plastic packaging materials and switching over to card board packaging material.
Alta has set up a rainwater-harvesting project on-site to make effective use of rainwater. We use rainwater to recharge our water bore wells and increase the water level in the ground. A rule of thumb is that one inch of rainfall per acre of land translates to 100 tons of water. This gives us enormous scope for rainwater harvesting and conservation along with the revival of underground water sources. By harvesting rainwater, we have also reduced the level of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) present in our groundwater source. High TDS levels make water unfit for human consumption.
Our objective is to reduce impact on the environment through committed and consistent improvement projects for Environment Management systems. To achieve this, we carry out sapling plantation drive every year at premises of factory. In continuation, we ensure that saplings are nurtured till the maturity stage. We also work towards beautification of surroundings and its never-ending clean-up.
At Alta we also ensure compliance with REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) – the new EU regulations designed to better protect human health and the environment.
Our Research & Development (R&D) is key to our strategy, ensuring long-term competitive advantage.
We have a pool of qualified R&D technical staff with a varied knowledge base and global exposure covering all areas of pharmaceutical research. Expertise in developing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), and development of New Processes is a key strength acquired over decades of experience. Creative teams from R&D and business development generate innovative concepts and ideas which are aligned to synergies across therapeutic areas and business needs. The focus of R&D is on quality product development, keeping in view safety and efficacy of product.
Our capabilities lie in developing innovative, safe, environment-friendly and cost effective global technologies to deliver high quality APIs. The ability to develop difficult-to-make, complex APIs by using the latest technologies is the key differentiating factor of our research. The instrumentation and analytical knowledge base at the R&D lab facilitate: