Merck & Company – Rixin Liu – 2021

Goals

The main goals set by Merck were:

• Be familiar with the current situation of the Wai Gao Qiao factory including: factory products, process, and energy saving innovations.
• Help Wai Gao Qiao Factory to pass the evaluation of Green Factory of Shanghai and other works on EHS issues.
• Collect environmental protection measures form peer companies.

Solutions

The challenge was completed using the life-cycle analysis method:

• Carry out on-site investigation on: the enterprise’s infrastructure, management system, energy and resource input, and products.
• Collect and organize the required certification documents for declaration materials.
• Calculate and relate key index and analyze the current achievement on energy saving and green procedures.
• Make a pre-scoring evaluation. Also make, supplement, and improve the evaluation report based on comments made by experts.
• Participate in the on-site defense with a factory manager for final evaluation.
• View peer companies’ works on environmental protection and make comparison between Merck with them.
• Finally, summarize possible improvements for Merck to further improve itself.

Potential Impact

With joint efforts, Merck Wai Gao Qiao Factory successfully completed the final evaluation of Shanghai Green Factory by experts. They used the lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology to calculate the carbon footprint, analyze every phase of the product lifecycle, and distinguish the bottleneck of energy saving and installed photovoltaic equipment to replace current LED lighting facilities. Merck will put in further work on climate issues and continuously make improvements on energy saving.