The first annual meeting of the group of EU funded projects on Green Pharmaceuticals was held on 10th December 2024 in Brussels. Hosted by the European Commission, representatives of the ETERNAL project and our four sister projects currently within the cluster provided updates on the projects' objectives and progress, and had productive discussions with a range of stakeholders from across the Community.

The ETERNAL project consortium's 5th General Assembly meeting in Barcelona on 24th and 25th October 2024 heard reports of continuing strong progress as the project's six industrial case study teams start to transition the focus of their work towards scale up for impact.

A recent open peer-review publication from Britest enabled by work done in the ETERNAL project details a new framework for early-stage sustainability assessment of innovation projects and an enabling multi-criteria decision analysis methodology handling uncertainty in the evaluation of the options considered.

The ETERNAL project recently contributed to the success of a well-received Speciality Chemicals Symposium run by the Royal Society of Chemistry in conjunction with the Chemspec Europe 2024 exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany.

We look forward into the year ahead with a sense of growing excitement as the ETERNAL project’s collaborative research and case study strands gather pace. With several parts of the project’s work programme starting to deliver early results and work progressing strongly across the board, we are looking forward to sharing some of the early highlights and our latest thinking at two notable gatherings of industrialists and researchers from the pharmaceutical and specialty chemicals sectors respectively in the first half of 2024.

As part of the comprehensive industrial cocreation process through which ETERNAL’s case studies are being steered, Britest is developing a methodology which variously helps innovators to find the most sustainable process route when faced with multiple possibilities, to identify and challenge environmental impacts, and to develop cost effective carbon footprint reduction plans across their products’ value chain.