Sustainability
Environmental Sustainability
NPI’s multi-national operations integrate important environmentally sustainable practices to deliver the highest purity product to our global customers, while assuring that its production remains pro-active with current waste reduction and recycling practices.
Yew trees sustainably harvested and replanted
NPI manages an aggressive replanting program to assure long-term supply of paclitaxel through millions of mature nursery grown yew trees. NPI’s yew trees are grown in rows to allow sustainable harvesting of tops. In older fields, entire trees can be harvested from their sandy soil growth media, leaving the land ready for replanting young liners from cuttings. Each cutting is an exact copy of the parent tree, a hybrid cultivated to contain the highest concentration of paclitaxel.
Biomass drying plant utilizes sawdust for fuel
At our partner operations in the mid-west US, the harvested yew tree biomass is heat dried with sawdust, supplied free-of-charge from an adjacent furniture factory. Literally tons of waste sawdust is re-used as fuel to dry the yew biomass for eventual chipping and pelleting for transport to NPI’s extraction and enrichment facility in Mexico.
Solvent recycling at extraction facility
NPI’s facility in central Mexico, ENAT recycles most of its large process solvent systems, including acetone and ethyl acetate. These solvents are routinely recycled using flash pot recycling, a single stage distillation technique. In the future, ENAT will scale up it solvent recycling with a votator, a thin film evaporator, designed to increase the recycled solvent yield and reduce the quantities of fresh solvent required.
NPI’s products are manufactured in NAFTA member countries, and are free from trade tariffs and changing biomass laws. NPI prides itself on maintaining a completely transparent operation, sustainably in balance with the environment.