"The Novo Nordisk Way of Management reflects the strategical and operational thinking of Novo Nordisk. Achieving the highest standards, reaching challenging goals and experiencing quality achievements are characteristic of our approach and essential to our continued progress."
Mads Øvlisen, President & CEO

Commitment, integration and globalization
Significant improvements in relation to environmental management and performance were made in 1997. Commitment, integration, and globalization are the key elements describing our progress.

Commitment to deal seriously with environ- mental issues is a message that our Committee on Environment & Bioethics has spread successfully to the organization, thus encouraging our employees worldwide to continue with their environmental efforts. Integration of environmental concerns into daily business decisions has, furthermore, moved a big step forward. And finally, increased focus on globalization has been achieved by the establishment of an international network of managers with responsibility for environmental issues, whereby a platform for the exchange of best practices has been created.

"Environmental issues shouldn't be dealt with in isolation. Instead, they must be fully integrated into everything we do - just like productivity and quality. That's what we will be working to achieve during the next few years."
Arne Schmidt, Corporate Vice President, Enzyme Production.

ICC Charter rating
In last year's report we published the results of SustainAbility's rating of our performance against the 16 principles of the ICC Charter for sustainable development using a five-step rating scheme. There were several outstanding tasks that all centred on the need for a greater focus on the international coordination of our environmental performance. We believe that the best way of addressing this need - thereby strengthening the global implementation of sustainable development - is to ensure strong local commitment to environmental excellence and target-setting at site level.

We have again asked SustainAbility to do the rating as part of their verification work. When viewing the rating, it is important to note that attainment of step 5 (practice in place) is by no means an end-goal, but rather a platform from which continuous improvement stems.

Environmental network
A network of environmentally responsible man-agers from our nine largest sites has been established. The network will meet annually to discuss shared environmental challenges and responsibilities and exchange best practices on how to ensure progress in environmental performance.

The first two-day meeting was held in Copenhagen in September 1997 and the next is scheduled to be held at our two sites in the USA in August 1998. As from 1998, targets for environmental performance will be set at site level and from there aggregated into corporate targets. As a minimum, local targets will be set for water and energy eco-productivity. Each site will also annually benchmark their performance against the ICC Charter for Sustainable Development. Each of the nine sites are this year presenting site reports.

Environmental management systems

1996-97 target: Environmental certification of Enzyme Business, starting with the factory in Copenhagen, which is to have a certifiable environmental management system by the end of 1997.

Although progress has been made in this area, the target was not achieved in 1997. During 1997 a comprehensive environmental mapping of every single operational unit of the entire production process was performed at our site in Copenhagen. Standard operating procedures are now being integrated into the quality system after which internal and external audits will be carried out ending with planned ISO 14001 certification in September 1998. Environmental management systems for all other major production sites will be implemented by the end of the year 2002.

New 1998-2002 target: Integrate environmental issues into our management systems. Environmental issues will be audited.

Integrating environmental considerations
In Enzyme Business environmental commitment has been firmly anchored in the business strategy in a number of important areas. For example, in 1998, we will be setting targets for improving the environmental performance of our production technologies and reducing the environmental impact of the packaging and transportation of our enzyme products.

How we manage the environment