Sadly, the GSK factories in Singapore were not what I had in mind (and most probably everyone else). The factories in Singapore only manufactured active ingredients, which were then exported to the US and UK to be made into medicine. I was, however, expecting to see the pills and tablets being packed into their respective packaging.
Of course, since the factories did not fit my imagination, I was rather surprised by them. The method used to manufacture active ingredients were extremely akin to methods of filtration we learnt in chemistry, except that they were blown out of proportion. Moreover, this was the first company whose factories really looked like the factories seen on TV. Almost everything was machine-controlled, apart from a few delicate processes.
The talk on GSK's sustainability and contribution to the environment was pretty interesting too. One does not realise just how much humans are ruining the environment until we crunch the numbers. It is indeed astounding to see that just the Jurong factory alone produces tons of CO2 a year. Likewise, it is equally astounding to see GSK's plans for the future to reduce their footprint to 0 carbon emissions by 2050. While I have no idea how they are going to do it apart from reusing by-products and increasing mass efficiency, planting many trees in the factory would be a good idea... Of course, they could produce their active ingredients using continuous process instead of batch to reduce materials used in cleaning the equipment, while ensuring the purity of chemicals via a more stringent filtration process perhaps.
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