We protect the natural resources
The correct management of natural resources is is essential to guarantee habitable planet.
At Ferrer we know that we will only to push forward a change in the trend with everyone’s help.
Therefore, through the Liveable Planet pillar, at Ferrer we work to ensure the protection of natural resources throughout our value chain.
We want to ensure that environmental aspects are present in all our daily decisions and make a difference because, in a situation of extreme crisis, every decision adds up, every action counts
Ensuring proper management of water resources
Water is an essential resource in all of Ferrer’s production plants. To take proper care of it, we apply prevention, reuse and recovery measures wherever possible and regularly monitor both the water consumed and the wastewater generated.
In 2022, we took various measures at our production centres to establish mechanisms for monitoring, reducing and reusing water resources:
Sant Cugat Pharmaceutical Plant
2 circuits with open, high-capacity industrial cold water tanks for air-conditioning are now closed circuits.
Improvements and repairs to DHW and DCW circuits, eliminating damaged and unusable sections of the pipeline.
Monitoring of consumption through water meters on the main water lines.
Optimisation/stoppage of the old osmosis water generation plant (low performance due to obsolescence).
Sant Feliu de Buixalleu Logistics Centre
In 2022, a new greywater treatment system was installed to reuse water from sinks, washbasins and showers.
In this way, the treated water is used to refill the toilets after flushing.
Sant Cugat Chemical Plant
Monitoring of consumption via wáter meters:
Installation of 25 water meters at different points in the plant.
A semi-automated database was created to provide information on water consumption by zones and specific equipment on a daily basis.
Knowing which equipment is malfunctioning, acting on the information and following up on the measures implemented.
A multidepartmental team was also set up to implement and regularly monitor these new measures, thanks to which several anomalies have already been identified and remedied.
In 2022, we continued to assess the impact of our activity in terms of our water footprint or the impact generated by the organisation in terms of the consumption, scarcity and quality of the water used in our direct and indirect processes.
In 2022, Ferrer’s water footprint was 73,451,658 m3 eq.
Since the baseline year, a switch from hydro-electric to wind renewable energy has been implemented, significantly reducing the impact by 90% on electricity on availability.
Commitment to the protection of biodiversity
In other words, biodiversity is fundamental to sustaining human life on Earth and, faced with the overwhelming evidence that it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate, we want to take urgent action to address worldwide biodiversity loss.
Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are among the greatest threats facing humanity in the next decade. They also jeopardise the foundations of our economy, and the costs of inaction are high and forecast to rise. That is why, at Ferrer, we set the goal of eliminating 100% of the deforestation associated with packaging along the entire value chain.
Within the calculation of Ferrer’s biodiversity footprint during our 2022 activity, we decided to incorporate new categories of impact in order to obtain a better analysis of our impact on natural assets. Incorporating these new categories will enable us to see the impact of Ferrer’s activities on biodiversity in more precise detail and to define more specific actions to minimise this impact
Volunteering and biodiversity
In 2022, for Liveable Planet Month, 49 volunteers from our California R&D Centre team removed non-native and invasive species from the Duck Pond and EcoCenter at Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve.
This work was done with the support of Environmental Volunteers, a local organisation whose mission is to promote environmental understanding and responsibility through hands-on science education.
Thanks to the pro-active commitment of the people who took part, they managed to make a positive environmental impact on more than 8,000 m2.
In the Mexican branch, 56 people made a trip to plant 250 endemic trees to reforest the Cerro de Moctezuma.
In Catalonia, two initiatives were carried out with the Foundation for the Conservation and Recovery of Marine Animals (CRAM) in Prat de Llobregat, where clean-up days were held on the beach in Prat to help create a clean, habitable ecosystem for the native species.
Also in Catalonia, a team of 110 people from Ferrer spent two hours building nests and bird feeders, insect hotels and seed bombs using the Nendo Dango technique, which were donated to different organisations and projects for the protection of biodiversity in the area.
Our goal for the reduction of negative biodiversity impact also applies to our projects for offsetting emissions from events.
In 2022, we organised the second LatAm Ferrer Summit in Panama, with the aim of offering continuing training to healthcare professionals in the region, which was attended by roughly 500 people.
The event was run with the highest sustainability criteria in mind, successfully offsetting the 106 tonnes of CO2 generated by travel, energy consumption, accommodation, food consumed and materials produced, through participation in the VCS Peralta Wind environmental project, an initiative to develop and operate an onshore wind farm located 280 km north of Montevideo, in Uruguay.
By the same token, Ferrer also created the LatAm Summit Forest, in which as many trees as attendees were planted symbolically through the Treedom platform, to raise awareness of sustainability among the Latin American medical community.
