Carbon accounting for pharma & medical devices.

Your carbon data is being asked for by CSRD auditors, hospital procurement teams, and hospital suppliers. A consultant’s annual spreadsheet does not hold up to the follow-up question. Normative builds carbon accounting for pharma, life sciences, and medical device companies that survives an audit and answers a procurement request the week it arrives.

Book a demo

Trusted by

Normative for healthcare

Pharma is responsible for around 4.4% of global GHG emissions — more than the automotive industry, with the majority concentrated in raw materials (APIs, excipients, packaging) and distribution. For medical device companies, the picture is similar: a complex bill of materials, a global supplier network, and procurement teams at hospitals and health systems now asking for verified Product Carbon Footprints before they buy.

At the same time, CSRD is making the full value chain Scope 3 mandatory for in-scope companies — and the audit standard for that data is higher than anything the sector has produced before. The consultancy that produced last year’s carbon report does not have the documentation infrastructure to answer the follow-up questions.

Normative provides the carbon accounting infrastructure for pharma, life sciences, and medical device operations: multi-entity ERP consolidation, audit-ready methodology documentation, and Product Carbon Footprints built from your bill of materials.

Impacts

Healthcare generates a significant amount of carbon, but accounting for those emissions is particularly challenging.

4.4%

Of global GHG emissions come from the pharmaceutical sector, more than the automotive industry, with most of the footprint concentrated in raw materials, contract manufacturing, and distribution

80%+

Of a typical pharma or medical device footprint sits in Scope 3 like purchased goods (APIs, excipients, components, packaging), distribution, and product use are where the calculation matters most

January 2026

CSRD double materiality is mandatory for in-scope healthcare companies, like their Scope 3 value chain (APIs, contract manufacturers, packaging suppliers, distribution, product use) cannot be excluded or estimated away

Barriers to accurate carbon reporting

For most of the last decade, carbon reporting in pharma and medical devices was a disclosure exercise. That has changed on three fronts simultaneously.

CSRD makes Scope 3 mandatory across the value chain. Pharma, life sciences, and medical device companies in scope must now calculate APIs, packaging, contract manufacturers, distribution, and product use phase — with a methodology that survives independent assurance.

Customer PCF requests are now standard in procurement. Hospital procurement teams and pharma B2B customers are asking for Product Carbon Footprints as a contract condition. Companies that cannot produce a defensible PCF are losing tenders to the ones that can.

Static consultancy data does not survive an audit. Most pharma sustainability teams started with a consultancy producing an annual snapshot. As CSRD assurance arrives and customer questions get more technical, that spreadsheet is the first thing that breaks.

Why Normative

Multi-entity, multi-ERP consolidation for global pharma

Pharma and medical device companies do not have one ERP. They have NetSuite at headquarters, SAP at the German plant, and a local system at the contract manufacturer in India. Normative consolidates Scope 1, 2, and 3 data from distributed entities, production sites, and supplier records into a single, auditable carbon inventory. Dimension tagging lets you separate, combine, or filter by site, business unit, product line, or country so the group-level number and the facility-level number are always derived from the same calculation.
Audit-ready methodology, documented as the inventory is built

Every Normative calculation carries the emission factor version, the data source, and the methodology decision that produced it — documented as the inventory is built, not reconstructed before submission. When a CSRD auditor or a customer procurement team asks why a Scope 3 number moved between years, the answer is already in the calculation trail. When an SBTi reviewer asks for your Scope 3 boundary justification, the documentation is already written.
Product Carbon Footprints built from your bill of materials

A PCF request from a hospital procurement team or a pharma B2B customer requires bill of materials data, supplier-specific emission factors, and a methodology that holds up when the customer sends it to their own auditor. Normative builds Product Carbon Footprints from your BOM, with a GHG Protocol-certified Climate Strategy Advisor documenting the methodology and producing an output that answers the follow-up question, like which standard, which factors, who certified before the customer asks it.