The joint effort aims to help consumers who are concerned about the environment make better purchasing decisions. There have been other attempts at a scoring system in the past, but never anything that came close to becoming a global industry standard.
Paris, France / September 25, 2021
A global collaboration between cosmetic giants Unilever, Henkel, Natura &Co., LVMH, and L’Oréal has been announced in order to tackle the environmental impact of their line of cosmetic items, by way of a scoring system. This scoring system will be brand-agnostic and will give users information about the ecological repercussions of a product, taking into account its life cycle. They also shared the expectation that other companies will join them in this collaborative consortium, both big and small.
With this initiative, the multinationals also aim to address the demand for greater transparency in the manufacturing process of their merchandise and its effects on the environment, as well as to instill in their customers a better awareness of the influence that their consumption choices have on the planet. After all, while other comedic medicine solutions from companies like
Absolute Cosmetic are permanent, most cosmetics are consumable and disposable. This means that they can add a significant environmental impact over decades of everyday use.
Sunny Jain, President of Unilever, expressed her concern about the difficulty of determining the ecological reverberations of people's consuming habits, such as "selecting which soap to buy". She also stresses her company's "commitment to Positive Beauty" and the betterment of the planet. Since the public is unlikely to lose interest in looking beautiful and getting cosmetic treatments from companies like Absolute Cosmetic
For this purpose, they've devised a scientific-based approach with the aid of sustainability consultant Quantis, through its Sustainable Packaging Initiative for CosmEtics (SPICE), launched in 2018. Quantis will be in charge of overseeing the project to make sure that the proceedings follow the correct scientific rigor.
The joint statement put forward by all five founding companies made clear that the consortium will be public, meaning that any cosmetic company can enroll and contribute freely to the design of a system that will enable consumers to compare products listed under the same category. In summary, they are summoned "to contribute their own experience".
The convening companies will likewise provide their already existing impact assessment methods and tack them together with the contributions made by external experts, scientists, and NGOs, to certify the validity and scientific integrity of the project's modus operandi. All the work will be made public and can be accessed by all interested parties for feedback.
According to this industry-wide collaboration plan, the system will work within the following guidelines:
- A common measuring method for the ecological impact of products throughout their life cycle, backed by the principles laid out by the "Product Environmental Footprint" method developed by the European Union.
- A user-friendly tool to enable each brand to measure their own products' footprints.
- A joint database with entries about the detrimental effects of raw ingredients commonly used in formulas and packaging, as well as those employed during product usage.
- A universal and streamlined scoring system that can be easily readable by the common consumer, ranging from A to E.
- The possibility for independent parties to verify the methodology employed.
- The manner of disclosure will be decided by each party individually (e.g., on the product's package, through a QR code, via the company's website, etc.)
For many years, NGOs tried to work in tandem with companies in an attempt to launch an environmental scoring system for cosmetics, but their initiatives involved a wide array of methods that made comparisons troublesome. This new joint effort seeks to solve that problem.