Towards Sustainable Pharmaceutical Research and Development: A Life Cycle Approach

significant environmental impacts associated with pharmaceutical processes. In pharmaceutical industries, amount of waste generated to the amount of product is several times higher compared to oil refining and bulk chemical industries. This is due to complexity of API production and purification. Therefore, these industries strive toward innovative products and technologies to reduce the amount of generated waste and mitigate its subsequent adverse environmental and health impacts. In pharmaceutical industries, crystallization is often used for isolation and purification of solid APIs. Several crystallization techniques are commonly implemented for purification of APIs at commercial scale, most of which involve the use of variety of organic solvents, resulting in generating significant amount of waste.
The objective of this project is to perform environmental impact and cost analysis for the most common crystallization processes implemented in pharmaceutical industries. The potential of solvent recycling as an alternative to waste incineration to reduce the environmental impact and their associated costs will be investigated.
Our goal is to develop a framework, which provide comparative assessment of environmental impact and cost of various crystallization technologies in pharmaceutical industries and inform designing more sustainable processes.

Faculty Supervisor:

Azadeh Kermanshahi-pour

Student:

Partner:

Solid State Pharma Inc

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Dalhousie University

Program: