More than 1,000 industrial sites already fall under the Clean Heat Program, the supplier-decarbonization initiative that Sanofi, Opella and UCB joined AstraZeneca in founding, according to executives from the program's managers, consulting firm ERM and supply chain intelligence company Secaro.

AstraZeneca launched the program in December 2025. ERM and Secaro manage it day to day. All four founding companies have set science-based reduction commitments covering their entire greenhouse gas emissions inventories — pledges that now carry deadlines the industry will have to track.

The material problem the program targets is steam. Drug formulation and production depend heavily on steam-driven processes, and those processes typically run on natural gas-fired boilers. The founders rank efficiency first among their decarbonization levers, followed by alternatives to fossil steam: heat pumps, biomethane and other electrification routes.

How does the program reach suppliers?

The initiative pushes suppliers toward the same transition through technical support and, in some cases, financing incentives. Knowledge levels vary widely across the covered sites, as does the range of technologies that suit specific regions, said Emily Prior, chief growth officer at Secaro.

Natural gas supply constraints in Europe have pushed heat discussions higher on investment agendas there, Prior noted.

"We've got some sites that know exactly what they need to do to decarbonize their heat," Prior said. "The blocker is financing. We've got others who will ask us, 'What's carbon, and why is my customer talking to me about it?' "

What does the program change for Opella?

For Opella, the consumer-health company behind Icy Hot and Allegra, the initiative accelerates work already underway on industrial heat, said Marissa Saretsky, the company's chief sustainability officer.

"For us, the challenge is not simply finding lower-carbon technologies," Saretsky said. "It is making them work at scale, across very different sites and locations, processes and suppliers, while maintaining the quality, safety and reliability that are non-negotiable in healthcare."

Opella's thermal strategy started with using less heat through automation, process optimization and upgraded heating, ventilation and cooling equipment. The built results to date:

• Three smaller-capacity boilers combined with heat pumps at the Narita, Japan, plant, cutting natural gas consumption by 20 percent.
• Natural gas-fired boilers replaced with heat pumps to supply hot water for air-treatment systems at Lisieux, France, and Suzano, Brazil.

Why does the accounting complicate the story?

Merz Therapeutics, a midsize pharmaceutical company that electrified steam production at its Frankfurt headquarters, offers a cautionary data point on how these projects register in corporate inventories. The Frankfurt installation eliminated 1.5 million kilowatt-hours of heating oil consumption and cut carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by roughly 250 tons — a 46 percent reduction in stationary emissions within Merz's Scope 1 inventory.

But the site now purchases district heat, which added emissions under Scope 2, the category covering purchased energy.

"It illustrates how data availability and accounting methodology can affect the visibility of operational decarbonization measures within a corporate greenhouse gas inventory," said Tatiana Kalashnikova, global sustainability lead for Merz.

What does this change for the pharma supply base? Suppliers to the four founders now face a coordinated demand signal — technical assistance, financing in some cases, and customers whose science-based targets extend across their full emissions inventories. Sites that lack even basic carbon literacy, in Prior's telling, will move up the learning curve or risk losing ground with their largest buyers.

The milestone to watch is delivery: whether the program's financing mechanisms convert the 1,000-plus covered sites into announced retrofit projects, and whether the founders' science-based deadlines hold as the accounting — Scope 1 gains offset by Scope 2 additions — gets tested plant by plant.