ABSTRACT
The pharmaceuticals industry consists of establishments that are involved primarily in fabricating or processing medicinal chemicals and pharmaceutical products. The industry also includes establishments that formulate pharmaceutical products and are involved in grinding, grading, and milling of botanical products. Although the industry is part of the two-digit SIC code 28 for Chemicals and Allied Products, it differs signicantly from the rest of the chemicals industry in its industrial processes and regulatory requirements. For example, the pharmaceutical industry uses more batch operations (87% of its manufacturing capacity) than the chemicals industry as a whole. Since some of the bulk manufacturing operations involve extracting relatively small, highly concentrated quantities of active ingredients from much larger volumes of raw material, the industry’s production yield for these operations is correspondingly low (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] 1997).
