ETERNAL project Technical Coordinator and Lead Researcher at AIMPLAS Plastics Technology Centre in Valencia, Spain Carlos Fernández Ruiz recently featured in a webinar where he outlined the ETERNAL project and its objective to reduce the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products throughout their entire life cycle.

Presented as part of a webinar series discussing mechanochemistry, green pharmaceuticals, and green chemistry, and run through the auspices of ETERNAL’s Green Pharma sister project IMPACTIVE, the event saw Dr. Fernandez Ruiz present the project’s key features and activies in overview, and then engage in further conversation with IMPACTIVE host Fernando Gomollón-Bel from Agate Communications. Topics explored included the question of pharmaceutical waste, its sources and what happens to it, the significant contribution of solvents to the current footprint of the industry (and hence the potential for solvent recovery and reuse, greener substitutes, and solvent-eliminating routes such as mechanochemistry to reduce that footprint), and the importance of thinking about wastes and material fates from the earliest stages of process and product design.

Reflecting upon the challenges of making impactful changes all across the pharmaceutical value chain, Carlos Fernández Ruiz spoke about how ETERNAL’s six major industrial cases studies are distributed in diverse areas of manufacturing and deal with challenges encountered in many pharmaceutical manufacturing situations. At AIMPLAS in particular, hot melt extrusion is a technology of interest for downstream drug product formulation, but this is just one example of emerging approaches that are being scaled up in real industrial applications in ETERNAL.

Both IMPACTIVE and ETERNAL share an interest in the broader context around the safe use and disposal of pharmaceuticals in healthcare systems and in society at large, recognising that small steps from everyone could together combine to a big change in approach. In the case of ETERNAL these are the sorts of themes being purused through our Change Labs activies for stakeholders in everwhere from industry, to pollicy making, to health care professionals and the general public.

You can watch the full webinar here (programme starts four minutes into the recording).