Saving The Rainforest

As background, I work for Baxter Pharmaceutical Solutions, LLC.¬† Formerly Cook Imaging.¬† It is to my knowledge to be¬†the largest parental contract manufacturer of medication in the US.¬† We mainly handle liquid and lyophilized products.¬† Lyophilization is “freeze drying.”

The main task of my job is to create the instructions manufacturing needs to actually manufacture the product.¬† You may think to yourself, “this sounds easy.”¬† Think again!¬† Since it is a pharmaceutical company, it is highly regulated.¬† I’m not just talking about the FDA either.¬† There are many other regulatory agencies throughout the world, and believe it or not, most of them make the FDA look like a joke!¬† Such as the MCA, these guys don’t mess around.

Documentation is everything.¬† If it isn’t documentated, it didn’t happen.¬† These “instructions” I create, use a lot of paper.¬†

The average “batch record,” as they are called is 70 pages.¬† In an average week, I issue 30 of these.¬† This is where the fun begins though.¬† Inside our filling suites, where the medication is placed into a container, documentation can only be brought in after being throughly sterilized.

Sterilization can be done in a number of ways, we use 2 mainly.  Steam Sterilization and Depryogenation.  Depryogenation was described to me many years ago in an interesting way.  If I were to kill you, your body would still be here.  If I were to depryogenate you, nothing would remain.  Sound interesting?

To get back on track, pages are steam sterilized.¬† Most of you may know that when normal paper absorbs water, it ruins anything printed, typed or written on that paper.¬† Due to this limiting factor, we have special paper for this.¬† It is very expensive, and for some reason we can only get it in A4 size.¬† The paper has a slight cream color to it and is translucent.¬† It is very strong too.¬† The biggest surprise is the price, $2 a sheet!¬† Ya per sheet it doesn’t sound like much, but in quantity that’s a boatload.¬† One client we have uses 100 sheets of that per run.

Back to my main point.¬† The amount of paper this company uses has bothered me for a long time.¬† True it’s going to a good cause, but couldn’t we use recycled?¬† I have heard for a long time about a “paperless” system, and steps have been taken towards that, but nothing significant.

I know for a fact that Eli Lilly has went to a paperless system.  I have heard nothing but good things about it too.  It just feels bad that between 5 people, we use about 5 thousand pages a week!  I can only imagine what the company of 1000+ people uses.

So in the end, we are saving peoples lives, but are we actually murdering our future?