Building a Sustainable Cold Chain: Recent Insights from Industry Leaders

The cold-chain industry is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. Once driven almost entirely by technical requirements—maintaining specified temperatures, preventing excursions, and meeting regulatory standards—it is now shaped by a more complex set of expectations.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers, logistics providers, and technology leaders are being asked to deliver sustainable, reusable, transparent, globally adaptive cold-chain solutions without compromising the integrity of temperature-controlled products. 

During a recent Leading Minds Network seminar, leaders in manufacturing, data technology, and logistics from Amgen, Eli Lilly, AbbVie and LifeScience Logistics outlined a future that is less about incremental improvements and more about re-engineering the supply chain from end to end. Their message is clear: sustainability is no longer a marketing claim or a nice-to-have initiative.

“Sustainability is now a core operating requirement—and solving it well has real commercial value.”

From Sustainability Buzzword to Business Priority

The conversation began with a reality that many organizations are facing internally: sustainability goals are becoming operational mandates. Executives aren’t just being asked to talk about environmental impact—they are being asked to demonstrate it, measure it, and improve it over time.

The challenge is that there is no universally accepted way to calculate the environmental cost of cold-chain activities. Carbon intensity varies dramatically depending on mode of transport, lane geography, packaging type, and even network design. A pallet moving from Amsterdam to Chicago by air has a completely different carbon footprint than a reefer container moving from Hamburg to New York by sea.

Organizations are trying to unify reporting methods, but many are still working within inconsistent frameworks. Sustainability teams often pull from R&D, procurement, logistics, facilities, and even finance to tell the full story—or at least approximate one. This lack of standardization creates friction, especially when pharmaceutical companies are setting ambitious goals without a consistent baseline.

“Despite the complexity, most leaders agreed on one truth: even imperfect measurement is better than no measurement.” 

The act of tracking carbon emissions changes the way teams think about packaging choices, modal decisions, and vendor selection. When the impact is visible, behavior shifts.

The Business Value of Sustainability Has Arrived

One of the most interesting themes from the discussion was that sustainability and cost efficiency are no longer in conflict. In many cases, sustainability actions create business value: 

• Reusable packaging reduces waste and long-term cost
• Modality shifts from air to sea lower emissions and freight spend
• Network redesign eliminates unnecessary touchpoints
• Better forecasting reduces over-packaging
• Data granularity prevents excursions and product loss

Many of the most successful examples of sustainability innovation come from the packaging ecosystem. Reusable solutions are no longer limited to clinical programs or niche therapies. Enterprise shippers are building full programs around circular packaging flows, working with partners to standardize lane designs and recovery methods.

However, reusable packaging only works if the reverse logistics process is reliable. Collecting used containers, refurbishing them, and re-deploying them globally requires synchronized data, predictable inventory movement, and shared performance standards. In many organizations, those elements are still being built.

Air vs. Ocean: The Sustainability Trade-Off

Mode selection has become one of the biggest levers in reducing cold-chain emissions. Air freight is fast, reliable, and extremely carbon-intensive. Ocean freight is slower, greener, and more sensitive to variability.

Teams are learning to apply a risk-based approach to transit models, considering: 

• Product sensitivity and shelf life
• Visibility technology on the lane
• Buffer time in clinical or commercial supply
• Lane maturity and stability
• Packaging performance on long voyages
  

Long-duration sea shipments challenge packaging systems to maintain tight temperature ranges without constant intervention. That puts more pressure on real-time monitoring, analytics, and interventions from control towers during transit. When those systems work, the payoff is significant: dramatically lower emissions and cost savings, with no impact on product integrity. 

This is why many global manufacturers are building hybrid networks—air for lanes where speed is critical, ocean for lanes where stability allows it, and intermodal combinations that offer flexibility. No one is talking about eliminating air freight; the focus is on using it intentionally.

Data as the Deciding Factor

If there is a single enabling force behind sustainable cold-chain logistics, it is data. Industry leaders outlined the shift from shipment-level visibility to vial-level or unit-level visibility, especially for high-value cell and gene therapies.

When every degree-hour of exposure matters, small fluctuations are not just risk—they are insight. Rich environmental data allows teams to: 

• Predict stability risk before excursions occur
• Adjust packaging based on lane behavior
• Select the most sustainable mode without guessing
• Prove the impact of interventions
• Build business cases for procurement teams
  

Data also changes how organizations talk about sustainability internally. Instead of arguing from principles, they argue with numbers. Instead of promising outcomes, they validate them.

This is especially critical as regulatory bodies show increasing interest in environmental transparency.

“As sustainability reporting becomes standardized through global frameworks data ownership will matter.”

The Ecosystem Is More Important Than Any Single Vendor

A recurring theme across the discussion was that no organization can build a fully sustainable cold chain alone. The industry is too fragmented. Packaging manufacturers, data platforms, carriers, and logistics brokers all own pieces of the solution. The companies that will make the most progress are the ones designing ecosystems, not just vendor relationships.

This has sparked a shift from transactional procurement to strategic collaboration. Instead of bidding out packaging every 12 months, manufacturers are forming multi-year partnerships to design custom solutions and circular flows. Instead of buying loggers per shipment, they invest in visibility platforms that power long-term optimization.

The ecosystem approach also encourages standardization. When the same packaging type flows through multiple lanes with multiple carriers, comparisons become easier. When the same data architecture covers both air and ocean lanes, mode decisions become clearer.

Sustainability and Resilience Are Converging

Interestingly, several executives noted that sustainability initiatives often improve resilience. When organizations reduce reliance on air freight, they become less exposed to capacity shocks and rate spikes. When they rely more on reusable packaging, they are less dependent on single suppliers during shortages. When they redesign networks, they uncover redundancies that reduce risk.

This convergence suggests that sustainability is not a separate journey—it is part of a broader shift toward supply chain maturity. The goal is not a greener version of today’s processes, but a fundamentally better approach to global distribution.

What’s Next

Looking forward, the industry will likely see three major developments:

1. Standardized Carbon Metrics

Progress will accelerate when companies measure carbon emissions using a consistent formula. Industry groups and regulatory bodies are already exploring frameworks that would make reporting more accurate and comparable.

2. Operationalized Reuse

Reusable packaging will move from pilot programs to everyday practice. As the economics become clearer and recovery networks mature, reuse will become the default—especially for high-volume commercial lanes.

3.  AI-Driven Decision Models 

As environmental and logistics data sets grow, teams will start making sustainability decisions in real time. AI models will recommend packaging formats based on lane performance, choose the optimal mode of transport based on risk and carbon impact, and simulate what-if scenarios with high accuracy.

Conclusion: The Inflection Point Is Here

The cold-chain sector is approaching a strategic inflection point. Sustainability has already moved from conceptual to operational, and companies are no longer asking whether it matters—they are asking how fast they can build the capabilities required to deliver it.

The leaders shaping this future view sustainability as a competitive advantage, not a cost center. They see reusable systems as an investment, not an experiment. They understand that data is the currency of trust, and ecosystems are more powerful than any standalone solution.

Solving sustainability in the cold chain is not a single innovation—it is the deliberate redesign of how products move, how teams collaborate, and how performance is measured. The companies that embrace this shift will not only meet their environmental commitments; they will build the most efficient, resilient, and scalable supply networks in the industry.