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Scaling Responsibly: Alnylam’s Approach to Sustainable Operations
July 8, 2026
Tim Maines
Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Growth expands our ability to serve patients. It also expands our responsibility for how that work is done.
Modern medicines require energy, water, materials, transportation, highly controlled facilities, and rigorous quality systems. Those demands are real. At Alnylam, we do not use them to excuse environmental impact. We use them to challenge ourselves to operate with greater discipline, efficiency, and imagination.
As Alnylam grows, so does the scale of that responsibility. Our RNAi therapeutics are reaching more patients, our clinical portfolio is advancing, and our manufacturing capabilities are expanding under our Alnylam 2030 strategy.
That is why we evolved the former Planet pillar in our CR framework into Environment & Operations.
The change reflects a simple belief: sustainability should not sit beside the business. It should be built into how the business operates. You can dig into the details in our 2025 Corporate Responsibility Report.
How Alnylam Measures and Manages Its Environmental Footprint
The first step in improving environmental performance is understanding it clearly.
Over the past several years, we have strengthened the systems used to measure, verify, and manage our environmental footprint. We now report Scope 1, Scope 2, and material Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions with third-party assurance, supported by software that improves consistency in year-over-year calculations.
That rigor matters. Good intentions are not enough. Reliable data tells us where to act, where to invest, and whether our decisions are working.
In 2025, we introduced a Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions-reduction framework through 2030, focused on renewable energy, fleet electrification, facility optimization, and on-site solar generation.
Our business and manufacturing needs will continue to grow. Our goal is not to pretend that growth carries no environmental cost. It is to ensure that our environmental performance improves as our capabilities expand.
We are also looking beyond our own walls. In biopharmaceuticals, much of the environmental footprint sits across the value chain, including suppliers, logistics providers, contract manufacturers, and product-lifecycle decisions.
We are building better supplier-level visibility so environmental performance can become a more explicit part of how we select, assess, and work with partners.
RNAi Manufacturing Innovation as a Sustainability Strategy
At Alnylam, manufacturing innovation and sustainability are inseparable.
We pioneered RNAi therapeutics when there was no established blueprint for producing this class of medicines. That required us to build new technologies, processes, facilities, and partnerships from the ground up.
Our manufacturing site in Norton, Massachusetts, is central to that work. As Alnylam’s global manufacturing headquarters, Norton is not simply a production site. It is a platform for innovation, learning, resilience, and scale.
As we expand the site, we are investing in next-generation technologies designed to increase capacity, reduce complexity, and produce RNAi therapeutics more efficiently.
One example is siRELIS™, our proprietary RNAi enzymatic ligation manufacturing platform. It is designed to use fewer materials and plant resources while substantially increasing manufacturing capacity.
That matters for both patients and the environment. Greater efficiency can strengthen supply, support broader access, reduce operational complexity, and lower the resources required to produce each unit of medicine.
This is what sustainability at scale looks like: not compensating for growth after the fact but designing better ways to grow from the beginning.
Alnylam medicines during the "fill and finish" stage of manufacturingEnergy Usage and Recycling Progress Across Alnylam’s Footprint
Sustainability advances through major strategic choices and through the practical improvements teams make every day.
At Norton, we continued to advance plans for an on-site solar installation to support our growing manufacturing footprint with renewable energy.
We completed a fleet-electrification feasibility study across the United Kingdom and European Union and are evaluating opportunities for our U.S. fleet as transportation technologies and infrastructure evolve.
In our laboratories, our partnership with Polycarbin helped recycle more than 5,000 pounds of laboratory plastic and avoid more than 25,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in 2025.
Our employees are also driving progress. This year, Alnylam’s Green Team became a formal Employee Resource Network, recognizing the role employees play in turning priorities into action.
Through My Green Lab® certification efforts, recycling, electronic-waste programs, education, and community engagement, our teams continue to bring energy and ownership to this work.
Strategies set direction. People create momentum.
What Comes Next for Alnylam
The next stage is to turn better data and stronger operating practices into clearer targets, greater transparency, and more explicit expectations across our network.
In the year ahead, we plan to define our environmental targets more fully, strengthen public disclosure through globally recognized platforms such as CDP, continue assessing climate-related risks, increase supplier engagement, and advance renewable energy and operational-efficiency projects.
This work demands the same mindset that has shaped Alnylam from the beginning: Challenge Accepted.
We are building a company capable of delivering life-changing medicines to millions of patients. Scientific achievement is only part of that obligation. We must also build the systems, facilities, technologies, and ways of working that allow us to scale responsibly.
Improving human health and protecting the environment are not separate ambitions. They are connected responsibilities.
How we manufacture, build, source, and scale is part of the responsibility that comes with making the medicine.
Learn more about our approach to Corporate Responsibility and how we make our medicines.
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