In the February PharmaForFuture column, the interview with Stefano Fatelli, CEO of Difa Cooper, a leading Italian company in dermatology of the CANTABRIA LABS group, a private healthcare company with a strong vocation in dermatology.
What role does sustainability play in your business model?
For us it is a crucial topic. It is not a declaration of intent, but a lifestyle, a continuous and daily process that has the aim of changing behavior and building concrete projects.
In the life of the company, in the interaction between employees, suppliers, governance, we act so that something changes every day. We look for work tools, buy new products, implement new processes to become more and more sustainable. We are quite scrupulous, even in small things, for example: when we decided to replace plastic with water bottles, we looked for products that were recyclable, because even for water bottles there is a disposal issue. We are a family business, our project is based on a long-term strategy. After us there will be our children and their children, not shareholders and investors, tomorrow is necessarily the center of our vision.
What actions have you already taken in this direction?
We have eliminated plastic from corporate life, it has been a huge and widespread process, from the bottles we use to the cleaning detergents. We are working to transform all the packaging of our products, eliminate cellophane and develop materials that are not treated with chemical paints. We are also phasing out all package inserts, which is impactful given that we produce 100 million package inserts every year.
Our company is already a certified zero impact factory by the Spanish government, because we make sure to rebalance and compensate for the level of pollution we generate in production. We have built our headquarters in Cantabria, in Northern Spain, in a large forest and around a thermal source of hot water which allows us a heating cycle with very little use of energy.
Furthermore, I am pleased to say that Cantabria Labs Difa Cooper also achieved the Great Place to Work certification in 2019, an important recognition of the values on which the company has built its foundations: respect, closeness, enthusiasm, empathy, safety and sharing, to allow each collaborator to be fulfilled in their work, supported by a positive and encouraging environment
And what are the goals you have set yourself?
It’s such a complex learning system that we’ve made sure to give every employee a sustainability goal in her field. To really land a project you have to give everyone the opportunity to invest time and find solutions: it involves work. There are a thousand companies that bring a thousand alternatives, but I am convinced that people are always ahead of companies.
We are working on it, and then we will systematize all the proposals. In this process, we have created a “central committee” which is made up of young people under 30 who are looking for all the errors in the company. We need to figure out where we can improve, and they’re in charge of raising issues, from how we run the printers to the bottles of soap we use. These “picketers” are all young because, in the transition to a more sustainable world, there is certainly a strong generational element.
In the challenge towards sustainability, what are the main obstacles in your sector?
The world around us is organizing. However, it is a path in which we are not all ready at the same time, so for example those who want to replace materials and ingredients do not always find a system capable of solving all the steps.
And then there is, of course, a fundamental issue that is not always inescapable: we are a pharmaceutical company and chemistry is often irreplaceable and sometimes in opposition to a green world. So, the goal of our supply chain becomes that of replacing chemistry when possible but at the same time making chemistry more sustainable.
How do you imagine the future?
I don’t have an answer, but I’m sure that what we seem to have achieved today will be nothing compared to the goals of the future. So, I would say yes, I have an optimistic view, we are animals that adapt to evolution and we will all improve, both those who want it and those who don’t want it.
