One way to promote sustainability is by finding a new home for materials that would otherwise be tossed away.
My company, Roche, has just such a goal with a new sustainability initiative that aims to donate our excess resources to colleges, universities, and other organizations for educational purposes.
Like most companies, Roche sometimes has changes in demand and changes in production. This can result in us having more materials than we need. Without demand for these excess resources, they can sit for months or even years in the warehouse without being used, until they expire and we dispose of them. We are looking to take a strong sustainability approach by finding a use for these materials outside of our supply chain.
At Roche, we procure a wide range of materials including single-use consumables like plastic bags and tubing, various chemicals, sugars, and filters. Educational institutions can use these items for a variety of applications. By offering our extra resources to schools, we will help improve the value of the education that students receive while saving the schools some money. This initiative will also help our company to meet our overall environmental sustainability targets by ensuring that we reduce excess waste and our carbon footprint. In addition, because it is expensive to properly dispose of materials, we will gain the benefit of reducing our operational costs.
As we prepare to launch this plan, we are currently working to expand our network of schools interested in participating. At first, we looked at educational institutions close to our facilities, but we have broadened our outreach across several states, and we hope to eventually expand our donations even farther across the country.
This initiative is led by three of our Procurement Delivery Managers: Venika Marwaha, Chloe Likwong, and myself. We are looking to formally start our new program soon, once we get approval from our legal department and other entities, but we are almost ready to put the plan into action.
So far, we have had 14 schools and organizations who are part of our network. If there are any schools or organizations interested in being part of our donation network, they may reach out to us at marwahav@gene.com, and we would be happy to work with them.
We hope our plan inspires other corporations to examine their own supply chains and to identify resources that they might donate and repurpose to benefit schools or other organizations in the scientific community.
Tomas Suliman has been with Roche for two years on the Pharma Procurement’s Direct Operations Team. He is also a member of Roche’s Global Sustainability Squad which focuses on achieving company-wide sustainability targets such as reducing the company’s overall carbon footprint.
This article was originally published in AWIS Magazine. Join AWIS to access the full issue of AWIS Magazine and more member benefits.