Our branch has understood, adopted and used the key EU environmental principles such as:

- prevention
- caution
- responsibility
- integration
- ability to plan

already before accession. Hence the new conditions and expectations brought about by accession did not take us unawares, our achievements not being born out of the blue.

Medicines are special goods: their market launch is preceded by painstaking and lengthy authorization procedure by the competent drug authorities. Documents submitted for assessment contain detailed description of the manufacturing process, equipments, the materials used. Any of them can be modified only upon the authorization of the same very authority - so, no matter how much we are initiative, innovative: changes are time consuming and much as we wanted to we can not always cross the tape first, even though we were the first to get off the mark.

Yet, we had often been pioneers - this obviously being branch necessity - on a given field:

- We initiated and built the first Hungarian hazardous waste incinerator.
- Earliest references on many air cleaning equipments are found in our branch (catalytic oxidizer, cryogenic condenser, etc.) in the spirit of prevention.
- The branch has been among the first drafters of voluntary environmental reports being accessible and understandable for the general public.
- In the spirit of product liability we organized campaigns to collect communal medicine waste.
- We became ready to measure emission parameters which are not regulated by general threshold values but whose control, to our mind, was important in the spirit of precaution.

Manufacturing processes, by which our products are produced - let them be chemical or biological processes - are very complex and composed of several subsequent "steps" and thorough cleaning operations. These operations, even by the application of the best available technology (BAT) produce but large amounts of material flows from which useful substances cannot be or are not worth to be extracted. Every Hungarian drug company fully takes care of the effective and safe treatment of these: over 9 bln HUF is being spent on these purposes annually, also in the spirit of social responsibility.

Environmental emissions are being checked by every manufacturer in well equipped, accredited laboratories, whereby generating thousands of measurements each year which are made available to the competent authorities. Our real aim, however, is to reduce these emissions or their impact, to this end we have been improving the manufacturing process, modernizing technology - see integrated environmental investment (in the spirit of integration). When the manufacturing process cannot be improved any further, cleaning equipments are built in to keep our emissions everywhere below the stipulated threshold values. Hungarian manufacturers have spent 10 bln HUF in the past 3 years on these two purposes. Further measures to reduce emissions are based on emission reducing plans in the spirit of planning. Hungarian manufacturers were also the initiators for establishing a communal medicine waste collecting system, which has already been working. - This was also in the spirit of social responsibility.