Ceri Breeze/ Alamy Stock Photo
Just over one-quarter (26%) of community pharmacies surveyed currently have a designated sustainability champion, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has revealed.
Speaking at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress 2026, held at Excel London on 8 and 9 May 2026, Amira Chaudry, senior clinical advisor at the GPhC, said that where such roles do exist, “seniority, scope and formality varied considerably”.
Chaudry shared the figure while she showcased the findings of a GPhC thematic review of sustainable practice in community pharmacy. The thematic review was undertaken alongside the GPhC’s carbon net zero action plan, published in August 2024, which sets out how it plans to reach carbon net zero within its own organisation by 2040.
In its action plan, the regulator said that its objectives are to lead by example in reducing its own carbon footprint, as well as to “green our regulatory levers to encourage sustainability within the pharmacy sector”.
For its thematic review, the GPhC selected a sample of independent and multiple pharmacies across England, Scotland and Wales for structured interview with pharmacy staff.
“When we asked staff to self-rate sustainability as a priority, the mean score was around 6.79 out of 10, and this ranged between 2 to 10,” Chaudry told delegates.
“So the variation was quite significant. Sustainability practice in community pharmacy is not consistently embedded, but it’s highly dependent on organisational context and, in many cases, it was dependent on one or two motivated individuals.”
She added: “The headline finding is that sustainability in community pharmacy is operationally active, but strategically uneven.”
More than half (53%) of community pharmacies surveyed by the GPhC said that they were aware of the Royal College of Pharmacy’s ‘Greener pharmacy toolkit’, which Chaudry described as “one of the most accessible professional resources available”, indicating a meaningful gap in engagement with professional guidance and tools available.
However, Chaudry noted that barriers were “predominately structural, rather than attitudinal”, adding that workplace pressures were frequently cited by respondents.
Recommendations to improve national consistency in sustainable practice set out in the review include having designated sustainability leads with defined responsibilities, rather than “the most motivated volunteer”, she said.
The review also recommends using digital infrastructure more — for example by using patient medication record and NHS platforms to monitor medicines re-ordering patterns and prevent avoidable dispensing.
Chaudry highlighted that one large pharmacy multiple told the regulator that around 3% of their dispensed items were returned to the NHS spine each year, which equates to around one million dispensed items being returned to stock rather than wasted.
“That figure illustrates the scale of unavoidable oversupply that robust systems can address,” she said.
Chaudry continued that across the NHS in England, around £300m of medicines is wasted in primary and community care each year. Each pound spent on pharmaceuticals generates around 0.16 kg of carbon dioxide, which amounts to an estimated 46,710 tonnes per year, she added.
