Over the last few years, Orion’s main initiatives to mitigate environmental impacts have focused on the reduction of solvent emissions. These have already produced good results – not only have emissions reduced dramatically, but Orion has also achieved significant cost savings. At the moment, Orion has no other initiatives in place specifically for the purpose of mitigating environmental impacts of products and services with measurable objectives or follow-up procedures. Orion is currently in the process of identifying suitable targets and methods for the reduction of energy consumption to achieve the objectives of the Energy Efficiency Programme of the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) and also to achieve cost savings.

Orion has been able to increase sorting of waste as the collection services and further processing have provided purposeful means for this. Consumption of office paper has reduced significantly thanks to increased electronic documentation, more efficientversion management and storing of documents. Printers have been set to print in black and white and double-sided by default. Use of paper is reduced notably also by the new system for research data management and by the introduction of an electronic maintenance system for regulatory documentation.

In 2009, all employees driving a company car participated in courses in economic driving and as a result, average fuel consumption was reduced by more than 0.5 litres per 100 km. Cars with CO₂ emissions not exceeding 160 g/km are approved for company cars.

As a rule, operations are planned and managed in Orion in a cost and risk-conscious manner, whereby also environmental issues are considered as natural criteria of solutions and decision-making.

Changes in the supply chain operations of pharmaceutical industry tend to take a relatively long time to implement because the granted marketing authorisations are based on the manufacturing method presented by the manufacturer.  If changes are planned to be made to the manufacturing method due to environmental reasons for example, each national drug authority having granted a marketing authorisation must be proven that the new method does not affect the product’s efficacy or safety, and the marketing authorisations must be updated via a so-called variation procedure to reflect the changed manufacturing method.