Cosmetic majors L’Oreal, Henkel, Unilever, LVMH and Natura & Co (owner of the Body Shop) have announced they will be collaborating to make customers more aware of their environmental footprint, through a scoring system that will assess each brands’ products according to the environmental impact of their formula, packaging and supply-chain transparency.
The new initiative has been called the Eco-Beauty Score Consortium, and is being supported by industry body Cosmetics Europe. It was announced earlier this week (20 September) via a joint press release from the participating brands, who also called for other cosmetic groups to join the scheme. According to the participants, the consortium will be based on a ‘brand-agnostic’ approach which ‘provides consumers with clear, transparent and comparable environmental impact information, based on a common science-based methodology’.
Measuring products’ environmental impacts will be based in part on the European Union’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) principles and will give each product a score from A to E, ranking sustainability from highest to lowest respectively.
“It is possible for the cosmetics sector, as has happened in other sectors, to build a scientific environmental impact assessment of their products, based on a full life cycle assessment. It requires a cross-industry pooling of knowledge and expertise, particularly concerning the environmental impact data; this is exactly what the consortium founding members are embarking on” said Philippe Osset, expert in the application of life cycle assessment to eco-design for the European Commission and AFNOR (French Standardization Association).
L’Oreal has in fact been applying this approach since last year under its owned brand Garnier, using a digital assessment tool to rank products on their ecological footprint. The other brands who signed up to the consortium are reportedly underway with developing environmental impact assessment methodologies for product ingredients and packaging, as well as the energy use and emissions produced when manufacturing the items.
It is not yet known when the new scores will be appearing from brands involved in the Eco-Beauty Score Consortium.
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