Merck opens €150m climate-neutral filter manufacturing facility in Ireland
Posted: 18 September 2025 | Dominic Tyer (European Pharmaceutical Review) | No comments yet
The German pharma company will create over 200 jobs at its new Blarney site in Cork.
Germany’s Merck has opened its first climate-neutral manufacturing facility – a €150 million site at Blarney in Cork that will be powered by 100 percent renewable electricity.
It’s the first of the pharma company’s manufacturing operations to have been specifically designed to run on a full climate-neutral basis and marks a key milestone in the company’s ambition to achieve climate neutrality by 2040.
The 3,000-square-metre cleanroom facility will be used to support global demand for Merck filtration products used the manufacturing of products such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and cell and gene therapies.
By locating the site in Ireland Merck also hopes to strengthen its “in-region-for-region” supply resilience and reduce cross-border dependencies for its customers.
Jean-Charles Wirth, Member of the Executive Board of Merck and CEO Life Science, said: “Ireland is a leading hub for biopharmaceutical manufacturing and innovation for Europe and globally.
“By expanding manufacturing in Cork, we reinforce our in-region-for-region manufacturing and supply model, reducing cross-border risks and providing manufacturers with reliable access to critical filtration technologies they need to deliver life-changing therapies.”
The move is part of the company’s €440 million investment in the country and is set to create over 200 jobs in filter production by 2028.
The Blarney site is expected to be up and running by the end of 2025, when it will begin manufacturing the filtration devices used in aseptic processing, tangential-flow filtration and virus filtration that are key components of most bioprocessing templates.
The facility will run on 100 percent renewable electricity and use a heat recovery system that Merck estimates will avoid producing up to 61 metric tons of CO2 equivalents each year. It will also re-use up to 95 percent of high-purity reverse osmosis water from the company’s filtration manufacturing process.
Merck’s new Blarney Business Park facility is part of its largest life science investment to date and, added to the company’s nearby Carrigtwohill site, forms part of a €440 million membrane and filtration manufacturing expansion in Ireland. That investment is in turn part of a €2 billion global life science expansion programme Merck announced in 2020.
