Green Design of Plant Based Pharmaceutical Drugs: Example of a Wound Healing Topical Cream with Plectranthus Bojeri (Benth) Hedge Lamiaceae Extract

To ensure the perennity of natural resources, the valorisation process of herbal pharmaceuticals must be assessed for sustainability from the very beginning of its design. No specific tools have been developed for this particular field so far. We demonstrate in this study that existing green design tools can be adapted to evaluate plant-based products manufacturing process. As the example of a topical cream using Plectranthus bojeri (Benth) Hedge LAMIACEAE extract was considered, we first confirmed the traditional use of this plant for wound healing. It acts by accelerating the re-epithelialisation phase. Using the Vermeer Cosmolife version 0.24 software tool the ingredients of the cream such as sunflower oil and beeswax were judged to have no risk to the human health and the environment. A preservative containing Dehydroacetic acid initially incorporated into its formulation has been removed. The green assessment of the product design and the manufacturing process led to the conclusion that the project lacks circularity. The revalorisation of extraction waste using a biochar technology was suggested to improve this criterion. A new metric called “Plant Valorisation Efficacy Index”, noted IVEP was also proposed. This metric represents the ratio between the quantity of biomass that needs to be processed to produce a dose of drug for one healing cure and the quantity of total biomass that can be collected from an individual plant. This value directly correlates the effect of the transformation process with the ecological status of the exploited plant allowing a better estimation of the project’s impact on resource sustainability.