Last year, when L’Oréal Group presented the roadmap behind its newly introduced L’Oréal for the Future, ten-year social and environmental sustainability programme, one of the biggest challenges facing the company was its ambition to meet these commitments while operating ‘within the limits of the planet’. The company was well aware that maintaining profitability while respecting these ‘planetary boundaries’ would not be an easy task. It therefore set a number of goals aimed at transforming its business to respect the planet’s limits. These were: implementing the use of 100% renewable energy and achieve carbon neutrality across all of its sites by 2025; replacing 100% of plastic packaging with either recycled or bio-based sources by 2030; and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of every finished product by 50%, also by 2030.
Using recycled materials instead of virgin plastics in cosmetic packaging can achieve a reduction in carbon emissions of between 50% and 70%, the company has calculated. It has therefore decided to work with France-based Veolia in the transition to packaging with recycled content across its brands. Veolia will be the supplier of the high-quality recycled plastic L’Oréal will use for its packaging worldwide.
Veolia will recover post-consumer waste bottles from the consumer packaging waste stream, to ensure the purity of the material. The waste will be further processed and pelletised using innovative pelletisation technology based on a system for the elimination of organic compounds. The result is a near-virgin quality plastic material, which is currently in very high demand worldwide. This quality is essential for cosmetics packaging, to guarantee maximum health safety for consumers. The recycled resins produced by Veolia are compliant to stringent international standards and are food contact approved.