Nordic Life Science 1
THE ENVIRONMENT T E X T b y M AL IN O T M ANI R E
C Y C L IN G A chair made of insulin pens NOVO NORDISK produces a lot of insulin pens. These plastic products are an essential part of the lives of people living with diabetes, but they are also part of the world’s plastic challenge. An insulin pen cannot be thrown into the plastic recycling bin and they often end up in general household waste. For this reason, the company are looking into ways to give their devices a second life. In order to recycle the plastic parts, Novo Nordisk first needed to find a way of automatically sorting the pen’s many components. A machine was designed for this reason and a pilot testing on pens discarded after production has shown great results. “It just worked – so well, in The Baltic Sea EMISSIONS THE WASTE OF ONE – the raw material of the other At Orion Pharma’s Fermion plant waste ethanol is used to reduce the nitrogen load in the Baltic Sea. OUTSIDE HANKO IN FINLAND, two different plants are located side-by-side. One of them is Orion’s subsidiary Fermion, manufacturing pharmaceutical ingredients, and the other is the Dupont-owned Genencor International, manufacturing enzymes. The two plants decided to work together to reduce their emissions and their creative solution/technology has shown that the nitrogen load emitted into the Baltic Sea can be reduced by at least 50–60% from the previous levels. The alcoholic liquid by-products generated at Fermion, previously destroyed as waste, with the help of the new technology are now being used for cutting the nitrogen content of wastewater by significant amounts. The staff at Fermion’s distillery developed a method by which the weak alcoholic solution is made into a liquid with an alcohol concentration of 50–80%. This is more suited for recycling. The chemicals are captured in the light fraction, which continues to be delivered to the Riihimäki plant for incineration, but on average more than 70% of the waste solution is utilized in the water treatment circulation. The energy used in the distilling process comes from waste energy – and takes place at an existing facility. The new process was tested at the wastewater treatment facility in early 2020. A major milestone in the project was achieved in December 2020, when Fermion introduced a 20 cubic-meter container for the alcoholic solution processed at the distillery, from where it is led to the wastewater facility as necessary. fact, that we were able to use the discarded plastic to make office chairs, in collaboration with a Danish design firm,” says Dorethe Nielsen, Vice President of Environmental Strategy at Novo Nordisk. “Meanwhile, the glass from our discarded insulin vials has also been given a new lease of life after being melted down to create lamps.” The next challenge is to scale up the solution. The company also needs to come up with an easy way of collecting used pens from the end users. To this end, projects termed take-back pilot projects are currently running in Denmark, the UK and Brazil. NORDIC LIFE SCIENCE 69