Green Supply Chains Rarely Start With A Pledge; Target Waste Instead

By Ana-Zeralda Canals Hamann, Debiopharm International SA

If you’ve worked in clinical trial supplies long enough, you’ve probably seen sustainability treated like a side quest — something you “try to do” after you’ve locked the protocol, finalized packaging, and negotiated depot capacity. In practice, though, the supply chain is one of the few levers we can pull that touches nearly every trial decision: design, sourcing, packaging, distribution, returns, and ultimately waste. The good news is that “greener” doesn’t have to mean riskier. Done properly, sustainability becomes a capability, one that improves resilience, reduces cost volatility, and strengthens quality. The trick is to stop thinking in slogans and start thinking in trade-offs, control points, and data.

Start Where The Emissions Really Are, The Product Flow

In clinical supply, the carbon story is rarely dominated by one thing. Instead, it’s the combination of many small, repeated actions: expedited air shipments, overproduction to protect timelines, high levels of temperature-controlled packaging, and destruction of unused material because returns and redistribution are too complex. The most impactful sustainability moves are therefore the ones that reduce rework and overage — because every overage unit carries embedded emissions from manufacture, labeling/packaging, cold-chain conditioning, distribution, and disposal.

This is why the greenest change often looks boring: improving forecasting discipline, tightening cycle times, and building redistribution pathways that you can actually execute without compromising compliance. If you want a practical starting point, look at three “leakage points” that quietly create waste:

• conservative expiry and relabel strategies that force premature destruction,
• heavy-handed pooling rules that cause local shortages and global surplus, and
• last-minute country activations that trigger emergency packaging and premium shipments.

Protocol Design Can Be Your Biggest Sustainability Lever

Supply chain teams rarely “own” protocol design, but experienced supply specialists know how much the protocol owns us. Visit schedules, dispensing quantities, kit complexity, resupply frequency, and temperature requirements determine your packaging volumes and shipping frequency far more than your choice of courier.

Sustainability-oriented protocol input is not about pushing for fewer patient visits (though that can help), but about smoothing demand and simplifying what moves through the chain. Examples that routinely pay off:

• Reduce kit fragmentation: Fewer components per kit, fewer kit types, fewer country variants. Every variant multiplies waste risk.
• Align visit windows with realistic shipping cadence: If a country routinely needs weekly replenishment “just in case,” you’ll generate air freight and packaging waste by design.
• Rationalize comparator and ancillary strategies: Every ancillary or comparator line item adds packaging, labeling, documentation, and often temperature control.
• Plan expiry management early: Realistic expiry extension studies, stability strategies, and relabel pathways can prevent large-scale destruction later.

A greener supply chain starts when you translate protocol decisions into downstream waste and cost,  then bring that back to study teams in a language they recognize: risk, timeline, and budget.

The Packaging Sweet Spot Is 'Right Sized,' Not 'Lightest'

There’s a misconception that greener packaging simply means lighter materials. In cold chain, the real win is right-sizing and reusability, while keeping lane qualification and temperature performance intact. Oversized shippers increase dimensional weight (and emissions) immediately, but also create more warehouse space, more conditioning time, and more waste.

Practical moves I’ve seen work without compromising quality:

• Lane-based shipper standards: Define a small, controlled set of shippers by lane type (ambient, 2 degrees C – 8 degrees C, frozen) and expected duration, rather than allowing “whatever works” per shipment.
• Reusable systems where the reverse flow is reliable: Reusables are not automatically greener if the return logistics fail and you end up replacing units constantly — or if return lanes require air uplift. Start with lanes where returns are consolidated (e.g., depot-to-depot or depot-to-clinic networks with predictable pickup).
• Smarter conditioning and pack-out discipline: Temperature excursions and repacks are sustainability failures as much as quality failures. The greenest shipper is the one that arrives right the first time.

Also, don’t ignore the basics: consolidate documentation where allowed, reduce paper inserts, and avoid overpackaging “because that’s what we always do.” In many operations, the biggest packaging waste is self-inflicted and culturally reinforced.

Stop Paying The 'Expedite Tax'

Nothing blows up emissions like repeated premium freight. Air shipments aren’t always avoidable in clinical trials, but in my experience, a significant portion are symptoms of upstream uncertainties such as late IRT changes, delayed labeling approvals, slow-release testing, and reactive country activation.

A greener distribution strategy tends to look like a more mature one:

• Stabilize your cutover points: plan packaging campaigns and depot replenishment around meaningful thresholds, not last-minute panic.
• Use postponement intelligently: delay country-specific labeling where feasible, but only if you’ve built the operational muscle to execute late-stage labeling without adding errors.
• Consolidate shipments and reduce split deliveries: every split shipment has a carbon and complexity penalty.
• Prefer surface or controlled consolidated air where timelines allow: it’s not glamorous, but it’s measurable.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: you can’t “offset” your way out of poor planning. The best sustainability program I’ve seen was simply an organization that got very good at avoiding surprises.

The Reality Of Returns, Redistribution, And Destruction

The reverse supply chain is where sustainability initiatives often die. Chain of custody, temperature history, country regulations, and relabel requirements can make returns feel more dangerous than destruction. But destruction is not a neutral choice; it is a default that carries real cost and reputational risk.

A pragmatic approach is to segment materials:

1. High-confidence returns (e.g., unopened, controlled storage, traceable temperature monitoring): Build a compliant pathway for re-entry or redistribution.
2. Conditional returns (requires assessment, relabel, or stability impact review): Create a decision tree with QA and CMC so material isn’t stuck in limbo.
3. Non-returnable materials (patient-dispensed, ambiguous storage, regulatory constraints): Focus on minimizing overage upfront and improving accountability.

If you want to move the needle, start with depots, as depot-to-depot redistribution and inventory pooling are often the cleanest wins. Site returns are more complex, but even there, you can reduce destruction by improving kit-level traceability, temperature evidence, and documentation standards.

If You Can’t Measure It With Data, You Can’t Defend It

Clinical trial supply specialists live in a world where everything must be justified. Sustainability is no different. If you want leadership to treat greener supply as more than a nice-to-have, speak in metrics that map to operational reality:

• Overage ratio (produced vs. dispensed) by study, phase, and region
• Expedite frequency and root cause categories
• Temperature excursion rate and repack rate
• Shipper utilization (volumetric efficiency)
• Destruction volume and reasons (expiry, damage, regulatory, unknown storage)
• Reverse logistics success rate (return-to-reuse)

Once you have this, sustainability becomes a continuous improvement program, not a poster on a wall.

The Experienced Perspective: Greener Is Usually Smarter

The best sustainability initiatives I’ve seen didn’t begin with a pledge. They began with an experienced supply chain person asking, “Where are we wasting effort, inventory, and time?” The greener answer is often the same as the operationally excellent answer: simplify, standardize, plan earlier, reduce variability, and build reliable reverse flows.

Clinical trials will never be “perfectly green.” Patients come first, timelines matter, and uncertainty is built into R&D. But we can absolutely stop treating waste as inevitable. A greener clinical trial supply chain isn’t about doing everything differently; it’s about doing the most impactful things consistently — and designing the trial and the supply network so that “doing the right thing” is also the easiest thing to execute.

If you want to start tomorrow, don’t start with offsets. Start with your last three studies. Identify the top three causes of expedite shipments and the top three reasons for destruction. Fix those. Then repeat. That’s how sustainability becomes real in clinical trial supplies — one operational win at a time.

About The Author:

Ana-Zeralda Canals Hamann is an associate director of clinical trial supplies at Debiopharm. She has more than a decade in sponsor-side pharmaceutical clinical operations, CMC, supply chain management, regulatory, IP, project management, and preclinical services. She earned her M.Sc. in clinical research administration and a Ph.D. in molecular medicine from the University of Oxford.