Committed to Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions for a Healthier World

Gilead views environmental stewardship as critical to help the company achieve its mission and last year announced a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 25% by 2025, against a 2016 baseline.

To help achieve this objective, the company has developed a sustainability strategy that prioritizes three key areas of focus: growing our operations responsibly, reducing our environmental footprint and increasing our business resiliency. These focus areas bring together employees from across the business to measure, implement and build programs that reduce Gilead’s environmental impact and make the company stronger.

“Growing our business while reducing our environmental footprint is not just the right thing to do – it is part of how we deliver responsible shareholder value,” says Gilead’s Chief Financial Officer Andrew Dickinson. “Using finite resources responsibly and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels makes good financial sense, and will make our company more resilient.”

Gilead is committed to conserving resources in a measurable way, says Nicole Kho, Director of Sustainability, Health and Safety at Gilead.

“We announced our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% last April, and so far, thanks to the efforts of our employees and partners, we have achieved a 12% reduction,” says Nicole Kho, Director of Sustainability, Health and Safety at Gilead. “We view being nearly halfway to our 2025 goal as great progress, but we also understand this work requires ongoing diligence and we are committed to finding more sustainable ways to operate every part of our business.”

Recent investments in renewable energy are helping drive this progress. Five of Gilead’s large sites now operate on 100% renewable electricity. Following on a 2018 project to install solar panels at the company’s site in Cambridge, UK, Gilead also recently completed one of two new solar power installations at its site in Foster City, California with future installations planned at two Southern California sites – the company’s manufacturing facility in La Verne and biologics development site in Oceanside. Combined, the solar installations are expected to generate more than 9 million kilowatt hours of clean solar power annually, enough energy to power more than 1,000 U.S. homes for an entire year.

The solar initiative is one example of how the company is working to decrease its carbon footprint, says Joydeep Ganguly, Senior Vice President of Corporate Operations at Gilead. Other examples include a commuter program that helped avoid 90,000 vehicle trips to the company’s Foster City site last year and a transition from plastic water bottles to filtered tap water at the company’s European sites that eliminates 2.5 tons of plastic annually.

“These are just some of the many ways we are working to transition to a low-carbon future and mitigate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in order to contribute to improving the health of both people and our planet,” says Joydeep. “We are always looking for creative approaches to maximize our impact through both internal efforts and external partnerships to ensure we are constantly creating a more sustainable business and making a significant contribution to the global effort to address climate change.”

Look for more on Gilead’s commitment to sustainability in the company’s 2019 Year in Review report in early May.