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Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast, and I hope that you have gotten well into the new year of 2026 where you are. I am here today with Marwin Krull, Sustainability Lead in the business area Pharma at Körber Pharma, and also Vice President at Alliance to Zero. Welcome, Marwin.

Thanks for having me, Joachim. I’m very happy to be in your podcast today.

We’ve worked over the past couple of months to find a time that worked out. We both had the pleasure of doing a workshop on sustainability and devices and packaging in Vienna with PDA. And I wanted to share some of your work with our listeners. So why don’t you tell us a bit about what you do at Körber and at Alliance to Zero.

My name is Marwin. I am working for Körber Pharma as you already mentioned. We are a technology company founded and still located in Hamburg with facilities and sites all over the globe. In particular, I am working for the business area Pharma, where I am working on a dual setup. I’m acting as the product owner for our customer portal, and I’m also responsible for all of our sustainability activities as the sustainability lead or sustainability representative within the business area Pharma.

That means I’m summarizing and moderating all the activities that we have been defining as part of our sustainability strategy in the whole Körber group, with all the other business areas and the sustainability team from the Körber group. I also make sure that all of the things that are being defined get translated into tangible products at all our different companies and portfolio companies. Ranging from various special machinery equipment companies in the field of inspection, packaging, but also aseptic processing, but also packaging material topics and also software related topics in the context of MES systems.

Besides that, I am an active part of the Alliance to Zero for approximately four to four and a half years now. I have the great honor of acting as the vice president for a little bit more than a year now. That summarizes it quite well. I am living in Hamburg and I enjoy road cycling and running in my spare time.

Oh, nice. Yeah. That’s good. I love that you both have this role of being the sustainability lead and working with the customer portal as well. I think one of the key mistakes that I see in pharma and suppliers is not thinking sustainability into your work with the customers and the core business. And I suppose that’s more natural when you’re also running the customer portal. Could you share a little bit about have you done any work or are you seeing demands on sustainability from customers? And are you actively working with integrating that into your products and offerings?

That’s certainly not a question that can be answered with one or two sentences, but I will try. Starting with the first one, a very clear yes. From my personal point of view, a very developing question. I am working in this role of the Pharma sustainability lead for approximately four years now. When we started that initiative or that whole organizational setup in the Körber group, we already had some questions from customers on certain sustainability things, which were mainly focused on specific topics like EcoVadis certification, or whether you are actively working on sourcing green electricity. That was mainly it.

Then it developed in a more mature way and in a more demanding way. For example, can you support our sustainability targets when it comes to an SBTi target? Do you actively track and monitor your supply chain to ensure that specific climate related targets are pushed through the whole value chain? This developed into more detailed questions like, do you also follow up on CDP ratings? Is there a certain threshold of points that you are reaching?

Nowadays, within the last two years, questions are getting very specific because you really see that all the organizations, especially in pharma, have built up knowledge and deep insights on how sustainability strategy should look like and how it should be executed. That is also what we now see in questions from customers or potential customers asking, what is the CO2 footprint of the products that you are supplying to us? What are the goals to reduce that footprint? Do you conduct PCFs or LCA calculations following specific ISO standards? Is there a specific third party verification of your GHG inventory, for example?

That’s how the questions developed in the last years. We are trying to integrate these requirements into our products and make our products more sustainable.

But for our listeners who are not in pharma production and supply chain, if you had to explain to a 5-year-old or me, what is it that Körber Pharma does for the big pharma companies? What do your machines do?

Good. Thanks for the reminder. We are trying to be the one-stop shop for all our pharma customers, supplying everything required to set up and operate pharmaceutical productions for especially liquid pharmaceutical products, such as syringes and also some solid dosage topics. From a machinery point of view, we are supplying inspection machines, top load case packing machines, or specific end-of-line equipment. On the software side, we are supplying manufacturing execution systems like our PAS-X solution.

We also have consulting services and packaging materials supply, which is for example a customer-specific design for a carton or folding box. That’s what we are supplying to our customers.

That’s interesting what you’re saying about the developments of maturity on your customer side at the big pharma companies. They are asking more and more specific questions, going from “are you even doing anything? Do you have a stamp?” to now being very detailed and being able to explain, “we have our own sustainability goals. We need to deliver on our net zero strategy. How can you help us with this?” and so on. Have you tried to track if you’re aware of winning or losing any business based on sustainability?

I wouldn’t specifically say winning or losing, but it’s certainly something that plays a very critical role in our customer collaboration and in specific milestones in tendering processes or in general customer relationships. We are frequently asked by several customers, what are you currently doing? What are your plans for the next months and years? How are you developing your sustainability strategies and activities? I definitely see this in the industry, that both we as suppliers and our customers are getting more mature and are developing together on this journey of transforming businesses into a more sustainable way.

One of the big developments we have seen over the past two to two plus years is sustainability going into commercial, both from suppliers to pharma and also more and more from the healthcare providers to the pharma companies and the MedTech companies, which is a really good thing because then we’re closer to sustainability being a need to have and not a nice to have.

I know we have a lot of listeners who are in sustainability functions in both supplier companies, pharma companies and hospitals. How have you worked? What does your sustainability role look like and how are you helping Körber Pharma work with sustainability and increase the maturity? It’s often a very challenging role when the requirements are increasing. Probably you also cannot and should not solve everything. How are you working internally and what does your role look like?

I always think that it is quite an easy and straightforward task. There is an overall sustainability framework or sustainability strategy that we have been developing together as a group for all companies and business areas that are part of that. To sum it up in two or three words: there is an SBTi target in place, a very specific focus on environmental, social, and governance related things, a clear focus on GHG emissions reduction, a clear focus on being a fair and attractive employer, and a clear focus on making our supply chain more sustainable.

That actually sets the whole frame for us as a business area, especially for my role and the people within Körber Pharma that I’m able to collaborate with on our different topics. It’s actually breaking down different work packages for the different emission categories that we have. For Scope 1 and 2, we are working on our energy sourcing, gas sourcing, general gas usage, diesel and gasoline usage. That is combined with waste handling topics, the core of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

Then you basically know what we have to achieve, and it’s just breaking down the whole strategy into all the little contributing parts and making sure that we are getting on track for all of these activities. That is it for the Scope 1 and 2 part.

Then there is more or less the same for the different Scope 3 categories, trying to identify measures that are either quite clear or things that need to be developed, for example the emissions in our value chain or the emissions for our products that we are supplying to customers. That is from the emission sourcing part, and that is breaking down on a year to year basis, asking where are we? Where do we want to be? What went well? What didn’t go well?

On the other side, I always see my role as some kind of moderator, making sure that all these abbreviations, all the things that make sustainability strategies potentially look quite complex or hard to look through, are made as easy and digestible as possible for all our different stakeholder groups, whether internally or externally. That is only possible with people supporting me in basically all roles that we have, from sales to service, product management, engineering, operations, and so forth. That’s where I’m trying to support our management teams to get the sustainability strategy into their groups or teams.

So you really have a catch-all function where you’re both working with reporting and engaging suppliers but also sometimes supporting in sales and maybe even product development and other things. How is your relationship with the customer-facing teams in Körber? When they get a demand from a customer, do they pass it directly over to you, or have you done some training with the commercial teams to answer some questions and solve some of the problems themselves? How’s that relationship?

In general, there is a very good relationship between our customer-facing teams and the sustainability team, because we set it right from the beginning. Every demand or request that we get from customers is forwarded to me or my colleagues so that we first of all are aware of what we are receiving as questions. Having a good overview and comparison of the different questions and remarks that we are getting from customers really helps to be consistent in the sustainability strategy and the communication towards customers. That is topic number one, there is a relationship.

The second thing that we tried, from the sustainability community last year we established a company-internal sustainability e-learning. When you click fast through it, you need about 45 minutes. If you read carefully through all the chapters, it takes 60 minutes. We tried to summarize all the relevant aspects that we think are important to understand or to know. Basically everyone in the organization, whether customer-facing or within the production teams, can access that whenever they want.

We are trying to make sure that not only the sustainability teams grow their knowledge and maturity in the topic, but also the whole organization, so if there is someone that is having a specific question, they are always able to put it into context and understand why Marwin is asking for this and that.

Because that’s an interesting challenge: how to organize that and how to make sure that the customer sustainability needs travel from the frontline into the organization. It seems like you’ve done a very good job of streamlining that process and just building connections and relationships with the customer-facing teams so that they know you and they know what to do when a specific situation comes up.

We are trying.

It’s also an area where there can be a lot of firefighting sometimes because I know that from a lot of the clients we’ve worked with, sometimes the sustainability questions travel slowly back but then the problems need to be fixed quite fast.

You are also a Vice President in Alliance to Zero. We had Arne Kloke, who’s the President of Alliance to Zero, on in a podcast a couple of weeks ago. Could you share with us a little bit about what is Alliance to Zero and why was it meaningful for you to join and help drive the work?

I’m very happy to do that. The Alliance to Zero is a membership organization from companies out of the pharmaceutical value chain. It was founded in 2021. The idea and the mission behind the Alliance is to facilitate or help the pharma sector to be compliant with the net zero goals that are out there, with a specific focus on injection devices.

We are a membership organization and the companies that are part of the Alliance include SCHOTT Pharma (part of the SCHOTT organizations), Körber, Harro Höfliger, Datwyler, Recipharm, and also Schreiner from south of Germany.

What we are trying to do is being a group within the pharmaceutical value chain that is really driving and developing tangible decarbonization solutions for the autoinjector value chain, making sure that there is change taking place which ultimately results in reducing the CO2 footprint of autoinjectors. We are also making sure that we are joining forces as the companies that I just mentioned, so that we as participating companies build our internal capabilities and internal knowledge, share things and best practices, and create a group of people that you can trust so that you can have a very open exchange on topics.

We are also being a partner for the whole industry and science, making sure that there is a good network and good exchange of information that helps all of us to make things more sustainable.

I think it’s very cool. It’s one of the things that makes me hopeful for a more sustainable pharma and healthcare industry, that unlike what many people might think at first, there’s actually a willingness to work together in these cross-industry non-competitive organizations, whether that is the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition or PDA and Bio Forum and other places. Even for companies that are normally direct competitors, I have seen good examples of them getting in the same room. There’s a lot to be gained from aligning regulatory things and others.

I really like that you mentioned that you also work on sharing knowledge for your internal development so that everybody doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Can you give an example of something that’s been nice to talk about? Two Alliance to Zero members shared something, or one company had solved a problem and then shared how they had done it with another one or the rest of the group.

There are two examples that I can share that I’m very proud of and I’m very happy that we were able to facilitate and start.

The first topic is a collaboration that took place over the last year between SCHOTT Pharma, Schreiner, Körber Pharma and Sharp, regarding the secure blister syringe project. A product that was packaged in a single-use blister was slightly redesigned. The syringe label was redesigned to make sure that it is possible to remove the blister from the whole product and replace it with a mono-material carton box from Körber.

That is quite nice because you see that there is a party involved with SCHOTT working on the syringe, Schreiner working on the label, Körber working on the packaging design, and Sharp putting all of that together. On the one hand that sounds pretty straightforward. But as soon as you get into the details of how to do it, how the solution can look like, what to think about, and what the interconnection is, then it quite quickly gets quite complex. Many people will be very familiar with that. Finally to see this coming into place and seeing that the solution makes its way through is really nice.

The other thing that we are currently working on is a collaboration with the Technical University of Hamburg, where we are working to get more transparency on the topic of green premiums, or additional costs for more sustainable products and solutions, and how this can be distributed in a transparent and fair way throughout the value chain.

I’m very happy about such partnerships, and also the workshop that you mentioned in the beginning together with PDA, and another workshop with Informa at the CPHI in Milan, or now coming up at the Pharma Pack. That is certainly something that we see as part of our work: to engage with the industry and make sure that we really get an idea of what drives the people in the industry.

That’s really cool. I love that you’re not just sharing knowledge, but that you’re also actively working on projects together. The syringe and the packaging redesign that you mentioned, it sounds straightforward, but absolutely nothing is straightforward when it comes to pharma devices. When you are an outsider, the default is no and “can we just have things as they always were?” Especially when you need multiple companies to collaborate. Even creating that collaboration within just one company can sometimes be a challenge. But as you show, it can definitely be done. It’s not a physics barrier. It’s mainly making wise trade-off decisions and uncovering the incentives and getting people together.

That’s super cool. Marwin, before we round off, if there’s one piece of advice you would give to our listeners, or something that has worked well for you?

I have one. What I would always advise people to do that are part of any sustainability team or activity or project within an organization is to always make sure that you are using the easiest possible language when you are communicating about a specific sustainability-related topic. That already helps to get more people on board and making sure that you get the support that you are asking for.

We always try to connect the sustainability activities to your product and service portfolio. Finally, it always has to match up. The better the match is between sustainability targets and the actual product and the core process of the company, the more likely it is to succeed.

And that’s why we are part of Alliance to Zero, be as open as possible and try to engage within the industry and try to learn from each other and try to see where potential connecting points are that can help to make things much easier. That’s what I would advise people.

It’s really good advice. Keep it simple and connected to the business case and share your learnings. Thank you so much, Marwin. If people are interested in this, where can they find you and your work and Alliance to Zero’s work?

At the Alliance to Zero homepage, alliancetozero.com, or just reach out to me via LinkedIn. I’m always open for every kind of request.

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