From measurement to meaningful action: Using medicines carbon data to drive sustainable healthcare

Medicines account for around a fifth of the NHS carbon footprint, yet measuring medicines emissions consistently remains challenging. PPP’s Accelerating health sector decarbonisation through medicines carbon footprinting report highlighted the need for standardised, comparable medicine carbon footprint data to support targeted action.

YewMaker’s freely available Medicine Carbon Footprint (MCF) datasets provide standardised carbon footprint estimates for nearly 35,000 medicine products, linked to NHS dm+d identifiers, alongside ingredient-level data. The datasets have now been downloaded more than 2,000 times and are being used across academia, healthcare and industry.