Abstract

Allergan has developed over several five year plan iterations methods for accounting, compiling and reporting carbon emissions. These methods have been developed as part of an overall energy and environmental management plan. In this article, I will demonstrate these methods along with how Allergan achieves acceptance and how Allergan has performed over this period. Methods for determining and developing projects, securing capital and expense funding, ensuring execution of projects, and post mortem analyses of projects and their impacts. Results will also be presented to demonstrate why this is a worthwhile effort for Allergan to undertake. To date, Allergan has reduce millions of pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and at the same time reduced operating costs and energy utility consumption.

INTRODUCTION

Allergan began systematically managing energy in 1991. Previous to this time, Allergan had always considered energy efficiency as a factor in design of infrastructure, processes and systems but had no formal way to know how effective this process was and what was actually achieved regarding efficiency and cost effectiveness. The first step was to find out what the energy consumption and cost was for each facility. The next step was to determine what the optimum level of energy consumption should be for a given facility. The third step was to establish approaches and associated projects to reduce the excess energy consumption to the optimum level of efficiency desired.

Allergan needed to establish a leader and teams to take on these tasks. Allergan also had to establish mechanisms for financing the projects. Strategic and tactical plans were developed with five-year horizons based on the three steps described above and what was technically and financially possible to do during the period. Allergan started benchmarking its operations against other corporations in the pharmaceutical business along with what were considered corporations with the best practices at the time. The first strategic and tactical plans were developed for the corporation in 1995 with a five-year period beginning in 1996 and concluding in 2000. A second set of plans was developed in 2000 with the next five-year period beginning in 2001 and concluding in 2005. A third set of plans was developed in 2005 with the third five-year plan beginning in 2006 and concluding in 2010. Allergan is currently working on its fourth five-year plans set to conclude in 2015. A vision set of sustainability goals was also established which presents how Allergan views itself in 2020. These goals are extremely ambitious.

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