At Thermo Fisher Scientific, our mission to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer drives our commitment to sustainability. We aren’t just delivering products that serve the research needs of our customers, we are striving to develop them in a way that minimizes our use of natural resources and our impact on the environment.
In our sustainable product design program we are taking a new look at how we design our products, and looking for ways to reduce health and environmental impacts across a product’s lifecycle, so we can move towards a more resource-efficient, closed loop system. This means finding better materials, implementing alternative ways to make and ship our products, and seeking partnerships with our suppliers and customers to advance sustainability beyond our own doors.
By designing products that require us to source less hazardous materials, that allow us to ship without Styrofoam coolers, and that are readily recyclable, we are able to minimize exposure to hazards, reduce waste, increase laboratory efficiency, and reduce costs for our customers.
As an industry leader, we have the responsibility to continually seek new ways to facilitate and accelerate discovery for our customers. We also look for ways to create environmentally responsible products—products manufactured using fewer toxic materials, products that generate less hazardous waste, and energy-efficient instruments and equipment.
By sourcing less toxic materials for our manufacturing operations and in our product designs, we help to reduce the regulatory burden associated with these chemicals, minimize the generation of hazardous waste, and ensure the availability of our products for years to come. Continually pursuing material efficiencies also helps us reduce costs and waste.
Our goal is to manufacture products with eco-efficiency in mind. As we make products, we strive to make the most efficient use of the raw materials and energy inputs as possible—whether it’s through how we design our chemical reactions, reducing water for landscaping, or retrofitting our distribution centers to high-efficiency lighting.
Packaging design is an important focus to help ensure the quality and performance of our products and to help minimize environmental impact. The first rule of packaging is that it must protect the product—whether from the mechanical rigors of shipping or temperature extremes. Our goal is to design packaging solutions to maximize freight density and therefore use less fuel per truckload. When we get it right, we keep costs down, lower our carbon footprint, and at the same time, delight our customers because they have less trash to throw away.
We’re partnering with our customers to help bring sustainability to their labs and improve the efficiency of their operations. We believe it’s our responsibility to provide our customers with not only the high-performance products they have come to expect, but also options that are less hazardous and more energy-efficient, create less waste, use sustainable packaging, and can be disposed of sustainably.
Zero waste, to us, means zero contribution to landfill. We don’t want our instruments to end up in landfill or sit idle at a customer’s site, taking up valuable lab space. Bringing used instruments back to be refurbished means we can harvest reusable parts and responsibly recycle what remains.
