TOPIC: austria

KUNDL — Stephanie Jedner is in a white protective suit, surveying production facilities the size of trucks. She walks past one of the giant tanks at the penicillin plant in the Austrian village of Kundl in Tyrol. "This fermentor has a capacity of 200,000 liters," says Jedner, who heads the plant's active ingredient production.

Everything at the Austrian production site of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz seems to be XXL-sized. In the plants around Jedner, a bacterial culture is grown using sugar, water and various nutrient solutions, from which the antibiotic penicillin is ultimately extracted. Up to 200,000 metric tons of this fermented slurry are produced at the plant each year. This is equivalent to 20 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

But Jedner's problems are also XXL in scale. The costs of cooking this huge soup have increased. Massively, in fact. The price of sugar has risen sharply since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, and the increase in energy prices is even more serious.

For the plant, which consumes as much energy as the city of Innsbruck, Austria, this is becoming a geographic disadvantage, with consequences for Europe as a whole: the Kundl plant is the last full-scale penicillin factory in the Western world.