Manufacturers of (bio)pharmaceuticals, medical devices and in vitro diagnostics have the opportunity to lead the way in the defossilisation of organic chemicals. Here Martin Held from the Institute of Biotechnology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Roche’s Stefan Koenig, Martin Olbrich and Jan Backmann propose how to reduce the environmental footprint of the pharma industry by establishing a market and infrastructure for the large-scale production of defossilised organic chemicals, benefitting other industries too.