Merck is committed to designing, operating and maintaining our facilities and manufacturing processes in a manner that protects people and the environment.

For the communities where we operate, the emissions, effluents and wastes from our facilities are an important environmental consideration. To minimize our environmental footprint, we design processes that reduce our demand for hazardous materials, prevent the generation of waste, and establish systems to reuse or recycle materials. When prevention, reuse and recycling are not practical, we apply controls and treatment technologies.

By tracking our emissions, effluents and wastes worldwide, we are able to identify the greatest opportunities to reduce our direct environmental footprint, evaluate the overall impact of new projects and ensure that we maintain reductions achieved through past initiatives.

Reducing emissions and wastes of all types begins with the original design of our pharmaceutical manufacturing processes and continues through the installation and operation of those processes. Through our green chemistry program we design new processes that use more benign chemicals and reduce our generation of waste and our consumption of energy, water and other resources. Our process development chemists have the green chemistry expertise to support the development of more sustainable ways to synthesize our products.

Solvents play a key role in the synthesis of pharmaceutical compounds, their formulation into final products, and the cleaning of equipment. In 2010, Merck used approximately 95 million kilograms of solvent in production and cleaning processes. The increase in solvent use between 2009 and 2010 was due in large part to the purchase of a large manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania that hadn't been part of the 2009 metrics.

Because of their importance in many of our processes, solvents are the primary component that we must manage in our emissions, effluents and wastes. For example, we must clean equipment between batches or processes to meet product quality requirements for pharmaceuticals. Though we seek to use water-based methods for cleaning when they are equally effective, solvents—primarily methanol—are often still required.

In addition to using water-based methods whenever possible, we have active programs to reuse and recycle our used solvents. When the recovery and reuse of regenerated solvents isn't practical, we will strive to find other beneficial uses for our spent solvents. To reduce our solvent emissions, we employ in-process and end-of-pipe treatment technologies and controls.

Environmental Remediation

Management practices for emissions, effluents and wastes have evolved significantly in the past 30 years. With research and manufacturing operations dating back more than 100 years, some of our facilities were operating when there were few regulations and little understanding of good environmental practices. As a result, Merck has responsibility for remediation and has launched investigations and aggressive and appropriate clean-up projects.

For remediation and environmental liabilities, including formerly owned and operated sites, Merck spent $34.5 million in 2008, $17 million in 2009 and $16 million in 2010. In addition, Merck currently is a potentially responsible party at 27 multi-party Superfund sites in the United States.