How Our Los Angeles Site Pursues Energy Independency and Helps Takeda Become a Carbon-zero Operation

June 11, 2021

At Takeda, we know that what we do now is critical for creating a sustainable future – a future that allows us to continue to bring life-transforming treatments to patients around the world. It’s our duty to innovate responsibly and to act urgently to reduce our own environmental footprint. Pressure on environmental health, including degrading air quality, increasing scarcity of clean water and other natural resources, waning biodiversity and impacts of climate change, is an increasing threat to human health and our way of life.

That’s why environmental stewardship and resource conservation is central to our business operations and practices. In the areas of water, waste, product stewardship and climate change, Takeda takes a bold approach.

One milestone we achieved earlier this year was reaching carbon neutrality in our value chain for fiscal year 2019 as a result of internal energy conservation measures, investment in verified carbon offsets and finding innovative solutions at our facilities, including our Los Angeles (L.A.) manufacturing site. Here, we’ve been busy pursuing different forms of green energy, or energy generated by natural resources such as sunlight, wind or water.

With World Environment Day taking place June 5, we’re reminded of the growing call for action to create a more sustainable world across the globe for future generations. Through our Takeda Environmental Sustainability Goals, we’ve set out to identify how we can reduce our environmental impact to better support our local communities.

“In thinking about how we can work to be better stewards of our environment, we took an approach true to our values and corporate philosophy, thinking about how our decisions can make meaningful impact for patients, our people and the planet,” said Obed Varela, Head of Environment, Health & Safety (EHS). “Given the amount of sunlight we receive in L.A., it made a lot of sense for us to look at how we could use solar panels to source our own electricity at our site.”

Using Sunlight as a Source of Electricity

We began the effort last year by installing more than 1,500 solar panels on our parking lot structure. The system has an installed a capacity of 578kW and can generate about one MWh of green electricity — or enough to power 700 U.S. homes for a year on average.

“With climate change having a significant impact on the state of California in particular, episodic power outages and a power grid that is under stress at peak times, installing solar panels not only supports our ambitious environmental sustainability goals, but it also ensures our patients have continued access to the medicines they need,” added Obed. “As we look to solar to help power our site, having a supplementary electricity source helps potentially alleviate any disruptions to the production of our medicines.”

Takeda’s L.A. manufacturing facility, which has been operational for the last 65 years, is the largest plasma fractionation site in the network, supporting the manufacturing of plasma-derived therapies for the treatment of rare, chronic and genetic diseases, such as Primary Immunodeficiency (PI), Hemophilia and Hereditary Angioedema (HAE), to name a few.

The ability to leverage solar power at this facility has been instrumental in our ability to maintain supply continuity for those who rely on such therapies.

The Power of Our People

Our dedicated employees also play a major role in making these innovative solutions possible. Each of our passionate individuals embodies the values of Takeda-ism — Integrity, Fairness, Honesty and Perseverance, brought to life through our Patient-Trust-Reputation-Business foundation. There is a strong sense of purpose and connection between employees and finding innovative solutions to serve patients, directly and indirectly. Putting the patient at the center of our efforts helped frame our decision making and guide our plans for our L.A. environmental project.

Celebrating World Environment Day

“Our desire is to not only be good corporate citizens but good neighbors to support the communities where we live and work,” stated Obed. “We understand that there is no one solution to achieving carbon neutrality, but instead requires a multi-pronged approach to create a more sustainable world. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished to date through the installation of solar panels and look forward to continuing to combat climate change – one initiative at a time.”

This year’s World Environment Day theme of “Generation Restoration” highlights the importance of reviving and protecting our ecosystems. Takeda has long been committed to helping solve key societal challenges while creating Better Health for people and a Brighter Future for the World. In addition to our green energy efforts in L.A. other recent renewable energy achievements include:

Our three main manufacturing sites in Japan will now purchase only 100% renewable electricity, which will result in 30% annual reduction of CO2 emissions at our plants in Osaka, Hikari and Narita.
We’re using renewable electricity at nearly all of our manufacturing sites in Europe. Our plant at Grange Castle, Ireland, now operates on 100% renewable wind energy.
We’ve also installed solar panels at our Tianjin plant in China, reducing the need for conventional electricity and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Through our purpose-led sustainability work, we look forward to continuing to do our part to mitigate environmental issues and create value for generations of today and tomorrow. For more information about Takeda’s commitment to environmental sustainability, click here.