30th September 2026

With the inaugural Sustainability Summit days away, David Roach, CPHI Online Contributor, caught up with Silvia Forroova, Director – Partnerships & Sustainability at Informa Markets, and Peylina Chu, CPHI Sustainability Collective Steering Committee Chair, - two leading players behind the Summit - to share more about the thinking, planning and the dedicated outcomes of the Summit.

The Current Imperative 

There is no shortage of sustainability ambition in pharma. Targets have been set. Strategies written. Initiatives launched. Expectations raised. And, most importantly of all, progress has been made. But perhaps this is what makes the next stage the most difficult one. 

“The easy stuff has been done,” says Peylina Chu, Chair of the Steering Committee for CPHI’s Sustainability Collective. “The next step requires investment and carries significant risk. There is no clear business case to making a change.” 

Chu’s bold reflection is a stark reminder of the reality of the situation. As the industry readies to gather in Milan, a reality check is a worthy reminder of where the industry currently sits. Much of the pharmaceutical industry has spent the last decade establishing a mantra of why sustainability matters. The current conversation feels very different, one where the question is no longer why, but rather how. 

 How can ambition be turned into something that works within the commercial, regulatory, and operational realities of pharma? How can the industry move beyond the first tier of the supply chain? How can investments be made viable? How should buyers reward suppliers committed enough to innovate? Who is prepared to stand up and carry the risk? And, perhaps most pertinent of all, who pays? 

When the global pharmaceutical community comes together at the Fiera Milano, the challenge sitting behind the inaugural CPHI Sustainability Summit is the transition from discussions to actions. 

For Silvia Forroova, Director of Partnerships & Sustainability for the CPHI Portfolio at Informa Markets and one of the driving forces behind the Sustainability Collective, the intention is clear: “Move beyond talk to action.” In Forroova’s words, that means shifting from “why sustainability matters” to “how to deliver it in practice” - translating conversation into measurable outcomes and ensuring delegates leave not simply with insights, but practical actions, potential solutions, and working partnerships. 

The Summit possesses an intentionality to its structure to deliver on such active goals. Roundtables sit alongside workshops, hackathons, lightning pitches, solutions labs, and a Commitment Summit. Challenges will be identified, pulled apart, and worked upon. Buyers and suppliers are not asked to just listen, but to participate. 

Sustainability, Forroova argues, has reached a significant inflection point. Regulators, patients, and healthcare providers increasingly expect concrete action, whilst sustainability is now front and centre of almost every business function: investment, procurement, supply chain design, manufacturing, R&D, quality, and regulatory compliance. The difficult and transformative sustainability conversations can no longer take place in the safe space of sustainability teams. They must happen where difficult decisions are made.  

Deepening the Commitment 

Chu sees genuine progress in the industry’s long history of pre-competitive collaboration. Through what she describes as the “Group of Groups”, some of the world’s largest and most influential pharmaceutical companies acting together, incorporating sustainability into procurement and establishing common expectations for suppliers, has helped drive meaningful improvement among Tier 1 suppliers. “The biggest gap is extending that progress into Tier 2 and 3 suppliers,” Forroova states - the suppliers behind the direct suppliers, and those further upstream in the value chain. It is in these areas where companies encounter different levels of supplier maturity, energy infrastructure, and access to finance. It is here where visibility becomes harder, as do the economics. 

The Summit will move deliberately across the value chain: from regional perspectives on sustainable supply chains and supplier decarbonisation to green chemistry, co-creation, AI, and the realities of lowering the carbon footprint of clinical trials. Fundamentally, the same question running throughout these different sectors with varying challenges to meet:  

What will it actually take to make this work? 

Forroova points to the friction organisations encounter when they try to reduce Scope 3 emissions and improve supplier visibility whilst simultaneously dealing with regulatory complexity, short-term financial pressure, and opaque supply chains. And, as previously mentioned, the conversation returns to the unavoidable question: who funds the improvement and who really benefits from it? 

This is where collaboration either becomes practical and meaningful, or remains something everybody agrees is important without ever quite deciding what it requires. For Forroova, the truly important modifier is credible. Collaboration must go beyond supplier compliance audits towards viable working relationships built around joint goals, transparency, and capability building. It means candid conversations about obstacles as well as opportunities, pooling knowledge around the problems companies share, and building trust across the value chain. 

Chu pushes this idea further into commercial territory. She states buyers must recognise that suppliers may be capable of doing much more if the incentives are right. Suppliers offering genuinely useful products or services could be rewarded with more business. Sustainability criteria can become more transparent within supplier selection. And longer-term contracts could allow risk and reward to be shared between buyer and supplier. 

This matters because the next big sustainability gain may not come from asking a supplier to do something better. It may depend upon giving them a commercial reason - or enough financial security - to do it. 

The Path Forward 

The Sustainability Summit puts buyers, suppliers, sustainability leaders, manufacturers, R&D specialists, procurement teams, and quality and regulatory professionals around specific challenges at a moment when some of these challenges are becoming too complex for individual companies to solve alone. From shared problem to shared risk - this is where the Summit’s format shines. 

 A hackathon can expose a problem and ask participants to work through the friction. A lightning pitch can bring a potential answer straight to the fore, of those experiencing a particular problem. A solutions lab can explore how an idea might be practically applied. A Commitment Summit can ask the next obvious question: what happens now? 

While it is difficult to expect two days in Milan to completely remove the industry’s sustainability challenges – in fact, Chu is refreshingly guarded about what success might look like: “I do not have expectations for a game-changing industry commitment to come out of the Summit,” she says – arguably, such a litmus test should not be placed upon the Summit.  

A useful commitment might be smaller and considerably more practical: engaging suppliers in contracts that share risk and reward; establishing meaningful sustainability requirements for supplier qualification; agreeing what happens when those requirements are not met; or joining an industry collaborative capable of continuing and progressing the work. 

Forroova’s measure for success is similarly focused on what happens afterwards: working groups continue to collaborate; partnerships developing across the value chain; measurable improvements emerging from those relationships; and shared challenges becoming shared solutions rather than problems individual companies continue trying to solve alone. 

Concurrently, the work of the CPHI Milan Sustainability Collective matters beyond the event itself. Its role is not simply to bring people together in Milan, but to maintain connections, follow progress and track achievements and partnerships - existing and new - throughout the year. The ambition is continuity. A commitment made in a conference room is very easily stated. Actioning something in November, January, or next June proves rather more difficult. 

Why the Summit Matters

There is another reason why the Sustainability Summit has the potential to be so much more than an isolated sustainability conversation. 

It’s all happening at CPHI Milan. 

The Sustainability Summit itself brings together more than 300 sustainability stakeholders and pharma decision-makers. Around it sits the much larger CPHI ecosystem:  manufacturers, technology providers, packaging specialists, procurement teams, scientists, suppliers, and innovators who make up the global pharmaceutical supply chain, and Forroova oversees a distinct and deliberate relationship between the Summit and event ecosystem. 

The Sustainability Summit can help identify the needs and expose the friction. The wider CPHI ecosystem contains many of the suppliers, technologies, expertise and potential partners that just might be able to address them.  

A discussion about Scope 3 might edge closer towards suppliers responsible for much of it. A green chemistry conversation can connect tools and metrics with people making process decisions. A clinical-trials workshop can bring sustainability ambition into contact with evidence, operations and the business case. A procurement challenge can encounter somebody with the tech - or simply a different way - of sharing the risk. 

Not every conversation will produce an answer, but the possibility of moving directly from we have this problem to who can help us solve it? is a compelling reason for bringing all into the same space. This is a significant factor given that sustainability itself is becoming harder to separate from the wider questions facing pharma, from resilience and innovation to costs, regulation, and security. These are no longer distractions from sustainability. They are now the conditions in which sustainability must succeed. 

A True Plan of Action 

Perhaps then, the most useful measure of the inaugural Sustainability Summit will not be how much delegates agree, but rather if the conversations at Milan result in actionable change, even from one individual or company. Will a buyer rethink how sustainability is weighted in procurement? Will a supplier find the confidence to invest because a customer is prepared to share some of the risk? Will a promising idea find a sympathetic partner? Will a working group commit and continue? Will a green chemistry tool make its way into an actual process decision? And will somebody finally have that conversation about who pays? 

 Forroova wants delegates to leave with practical actions, a clearer understanding of the support and technologies they need, and relationships capable of helping them progress their most pressing sustainability challenges. Chu puts one possibility rather more simply: “My suppliers can do more, and we can help them.” 

The next phase of sustainable pharma is unlikely to be delivered by sustainability teams acting alone, or buyers simply demanding more, or suppliers somehow absorbing all the cost and all the risk. What must come next requires individuals to work through the difficult realities: investment, incentives, contracts, competing priorities, commercial realities, and the inevitable friction between where the industry wants to go and what it takes to get there. 

While these goals may seem big for 3 days in Milan, the real opportunity of the Sustainability Summit isn’t simply to hear where sustainable pharma is heading. It is to be in the room with those who can help decide how it gets there, and leave with a plan of action. 

There is, perhaps, something rather Milanese about that. This is the city of Leonardo, fashion, industry, unification, a quite glorious cathedral. But it is also a city that understands football. AC Milan and Inter may approach the same game with different tactics, different philosophies, and different ideas about how to succeed, but ultimately the conversation comes back to what happened when the work was done – the result. 

For the inaugural Sustainability Summit, that result doesn’t need to be a grand declaration or a game-changing commitment. It might be a new partnership. A different supplier conversation. A shared risk. A pilot with somewhere to go next. A working group that is still working months later. 

Because for all the talking, challenging, questioning, networking and collaborating that will take place at Fiera Milano, perhaps the most important thing delegates can take home is also the simplest: Something to do.