Life cycle assessment of insulin products: Hotspots identification and opportunities for sustainable pharmacy

The pharmaceutical industry is essential to global health, but its products and processes generate substantial environmental burdens. As sustainability pressures on the sector intensify, Life Cycle Assessment has emerged as a key tool for identifying hotspots and guiding greener practices, yet its application to complex biopharmaceuticals such as insulin remains limited, with comprehensive cradle-to-grave assessments still scarce. This study addresses that gap by conducting a comparative LCA of six insulin products from Sanofi's portfolio, quantifying environmental impacts across their entire life cycle. A portfolio-based approach was adopted to streamline data collection, improve cross-product comparability, and enable simultaneous hotspot identification across multiple products. Device production, API manufacturing, and primary packaging were consistently identified as the dominant contributors, collectively accounting for over 80% of life-cycle impacts, with device production alone representing 44-56% depending on the indicator. Improvement opportunities are interpreted against green chemistry and green engineering principles and connected to relevant Sustainable Development Goals through an indicator-based mapping, demonstrating that targeted manufacturing improvements carry differentiated sustainability implications. Strategies for implementing portfolio-based LCA in pharmaceutical contexts are also proposed, offering practical guidance for embedding systematic environmental assessment into sustainable pharmaceutical development.