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DDS Market Trends
Pharma’s Growing Focus on Sustainable Drug Delivery Systems
Chapter of the 2025 Global Drug Delivery System Trends Report
4 minute read
Pharma companies are under growing pressure to embed sustainable practices across the entire drug delivery system (DDS) lifecycle, driven by regulatory mandates, market expectations, and corporate environment, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. Industry leaders are pioneering strategies to reduce environmental impact, with a strong focus on reusability, even for autoinjectors, which are mostly disposable. Manufacturers are increasingly developing reusable formats that help cut waste and are becoming an important design consideration. These efforts respond not only to sustainability goals but also to evolving regulations and payer demands that increasingly favor low-waste, recyclable, and reusable solutions.
This article explores how regulatory mandates, payer expectations, and corporate ESG goals are pushing pharma to adopt sustainable DDS strategies while focusing on reusability, material reduction, and energy efficiency across the whole lifecycle.
Key Drivers: Regulatory Pressure, Payer Expectations, and Corporate ESG Goals
Mounting regulatory mandates, shifting consumer preferences, and corporate ESG commitments are accelerating the adoption of sustainable practices across the DDS lifecycle. These forces are driving companies to rethink materials, packaging, and manufacturing processes to improve recyclability, reduce environmental impact, and enhance circularity.
- Recyclability mandates under the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation: The EU recently adopted the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which mandates that pharmaceutical packaging materials meet recyclability requirements by 2035. Additional pressure is building through the growing inclusion of sustainability criteria in national service tenders, although primary pharmaceutical packaging is currently exempt from certain measures like national “plastic taxes.”
- Extended producer responsibility regulation: Worldwide governments are incentivizing pharmaceutical manufacturers to adopt sustainable practices through the implementation of extended producer responsibility policies, which shift responsibility upstream, either physically or economically, to producers rather than to municipalities, and provide incentives for producers to integrate environmental considerations into product design.
- Shift in consumer preferences: The trend, particularly among younger generations, is towards favoring sustainable solutions and incorporating sustainability as a key decision criterion in their consumption choices. This trend is especially noticeable in OTC drug purchasing decisions, where an increasing number of individuals are opting for eco-friendly solutions. The Rx end-market, however, is anticipated to remain unaffected, as patients have no decision-making authority over the drug prescribed to them.
- Pharma missions to reduce their footprint: Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly integrating environmental stewardship into their corporate missions by setting goals to reduce their carbon footprint and eliminate polluting materials. This translates into optimizing product design, manufacturing processes, and supply chain operations to minimize environmental impact, while ensuring that safety and quality remain uncompromised.
Companies are now required to track a focused set of metrics to measure and improve sustainability performance across the DDS lifecycle:
- Carbon footprint: CO₂ emissions from raw material sourcing to end-of-life disposal, guiding strategies to reduce climate impact.
- Material sustainability: Environmental profile of materials, including durability, recyclability, and renewable sourcing, to inform design and procurement decisions.
- Process efficiency: Resource use (water, energy, chemicals) and waste generation in manufacturing, driving continuous improvement and regulatory compliance.
The greatest sustainability gains today come from improving manufacturing processes rather than changing raw materials, including transitioning to electric molding machines, sourcing 100% renewable energy, and investing in energy-efficient equipment.
Strategic Decision: How to Meet Sustainability Goals
Companies are deploying targeted strategies across the DDS lifecycle to achieve tangible sustainability gains.
Sustainability efforts focus on designing devices during the research and development phase for reuse, durability, and minimal material use to extend lifespan and reduce waste. Successful strategies include formulating higher-concentration drugs to deliver more doses per device, applying platform approaches or in-silico modeling to limit physical testing and material waste, and creating modular device architectures that can be adapted across multiple therapies, reducing the need for entirely new production runs.
The focus shifts during development, manufacturing, and supply chain stages to improving energy efficiency, optimizing logistics, and reducing material waste. This includes refining packaging and transport to cut energy use, enhancing device storage and maintenance for greater efficiency, and adopting supply chain innovations to lower carbon emissions. Practical measures range from using electric molding machines and energy-efficient delivery vehicles to optimize distribution hubs, employing reusable transport containers, and introducing lightweight packaging that minimizes material use without compromising product integrity. Industry leaders see reusability as the most realistic path forward, with cost-effective reusable injectors acting as a foundation for broader sustainability efforts and digital integration.
These considerations are particularly relevant in addressing the growing sustainability challenges associated with single-use pre-filled syringes for injectable GLP-1 treatments. Applying sustainability levers in this context has highlighted several priority areas:
- Reducing plastic reliance: Exploring alternative materials and improving recycling potential, as single-use pre-filled syringes rely heavily on plastics.
- Expanding multi-injection solutions: Designing devices that enable multiple doses per unit, lowering disposable material use and environmental impact.
- Advancing new formulations: Developing long-acting injections, such as hydrogels, to reduce injection frequency and associated waste.
Sustainability also extends to support activities, where efforts focus on engaging patients, regulators, and market stakeholders to promote responsible DDS use and end-of-life management. Many companies promote patient take-back and recycling programs, but while appealing in theory, they remain costly and difficult to scale without regulatory mandates. Pharma must therefore develop economically viable sustainability strategies, with greener solutions advancing gradually, driven more by regulation or clear incentives rather than by internal demand alone.
R&D teams are increasingly guided by clear sustainability KPIs, and the technical capabilities to deliver are well established. Among pharmaceutical partners, it is often the pioneers who recognize sustainability as a strategic value driver, beyond compliance. Broader adoption of this perspective holds the potential to accelerate and expand innovation across the sector.
