Cradle-to-Gate Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Twenty Anesthetic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Based on Process Scale-Up and Process Design Calculations

Comparative life-cycle assessment (LCA) of pharmaceutical drugs would enable clinicians to choose alternatives with lower environmental impact from options offering equivalent efficacies and comparable costs. However, life-cycle inventory (LCI) data of individual pharmaceutical drugs is limited to only a few compounds. In this study, we use chemical engineering methods for process scale-up and process design to utilize lab-scale synthesis data, available in patents and other public literature, to generate cradle-to-gate LCI data of 20 commonly used injectable drugs in anesthesia care to calculate their greenhouse gas impact. During the process of building the life-cycle trees of these drugs, missing life-cycle inventories for more than 130 other chemical compounds and pharmaceutical intermediates were accounted for using process-based methods and stoichiometric calculations. The cradle-to-gate GHG emissions of the 20 anesthetic drugs range from 11 kg CO2 eq. for succinylcholine to 3,000 kg CO2 eq. for dex...

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