EP124. Four pillars of sustainable beauty

The cosmetics sector is one of the world's most unsustainable industries. It uses vast amounts of natural resources to produce billions of consumer products that may be designed to go on our bodies, but inevitably end up in our waterways and in our landfills. Most of these cosmetics have not been created with eco design principles in mind, meaning that our use of beauty products has the potential to pollute ecosystems around the world with non biodegradable formulations and packaging. A few months ago I was invited to present the New York Society of Cosmetic Chemists on this topic on the topic of sustainable beauty, and my talk was then published as an article in Personal Care magazine where I am a member of the editorial board. I can't even begin to tell you how many comments and messages I received from all across the world from people saying thank goodness you finally said it, no one else was going to. And for that reason I realized that this information is so important that I have to share it with you here on the podcast too. So settle in for my four Pillars of Sustainable Beauty in which I put forward the blueprint for a sustainable future for a very unsustainable industry. Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, Chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school form Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my Green Beauty opinions in which I share my thoughts on how we can make the beauty industry a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. Despite the inconvenient truth that the cosmetics industry is horribly unsustainable, the beauty world has only recently started talking about sustainability at an industry wide level as historical conversations were mainly focused on the recyclability of packaging. However, a greater focus on the climate and ecological crises has forced a spotlight on the industry's need to play its part and as a result, both consumers and brands alike are finally talking about sustainable and green beauty. Now we should all breathe a collective sigh of relief that we're finally having these important conversations, because much is at stake if we choose to continue with business as usual. This half a trillion dollar global industry half a trillion dollars needs to dramatically change its behavior in the coming five to 10 years should it wish to remain relevant in the long term whilst also playing its part in mitigating the climate and ecological crises. Although many of the big players are now aiming to achieve net zero emissions and we're seeing more brands using recycled and recyclable packaging, the fact remains that we are currently not addressing the elephant in the room, which is the fact that the beauty industry cannot and must not sustain its current business model. The way we design, manufacture, promote, sell and consume beauty products needs to fundamentally change. Now. To achieve this goal, we firstly need to change the way the industry thinks about sustainability. I regularly give talks about sustainable beauty. You hear me on the podcast here talk about this topic, and I am continuously confronted by the observation that almost everyone appears to think that business as usual can continue. For that reason, I have developed my four pillars of sustainable beauty, which I feel sit at the heart of the shift the beauty industry needs to make genuinely wishes to embrace sustainability. So pillar one is less. And what does that mean? Well, the single most important step the beauty industry must take in the coming decade is to encourage less consumption and to lower production levels. You might find yourself laughing at this statement, which I completely understand because it flies directly in the face of the business strategy set by every major beauty brand in the world and most shareholder expectations too. However, we can all agree on the fact that we cannot drive infinite economic growth when using finite natural resources in every level of the supply chain. So here are some key statistics for you to consider. Firstly, the beauty industry generates more than 75 billion units of plastic packaging per year. That's pretty shocking. Secondly, the average woman has 16 facial care products on her bathroom shelf and owns 40 makeup products. And thirdly, the average woman is estimated to spend between 200,000 and 300,000 US dollars in a lifetime on cosmetics. That's the cost of a house. So these levels of consumption have grown significantly in the last decades and they come at a heartbreaking ecological and climate cost which has been overlooked by many of the corporations in the cosmetics world as their impacts are only now starting to be felt. But why is consumption so out of control? Well, the fact is that over the last century the beauty industry has very successfully embraced marketing strategies that thrive off consumers insecurities. When you are continuously told through subliminal messaging that you're not young enough, fragrant enough, you're not attractive enough, it stands to reason that you'll then seek to buy the very products that promise salvation and make you so called worth it. The beauty industry has contributed to wide scale societal insecurities that we haven't even fully begun to comprehend, but which have definitely impacted consumer habits. It would be easy to say that we need to wait for beauty shoppers to lead the way in lowering consumption. However, that is unlikely to happen anytime soon given the industry's successful marketing campaigns of the last 100 years. Furthermore, we do not have the luxury of time on our side and as very few steps have been taken to date to stem the flow of billions of beauty products into our landfills and oceans. So when I say pillar one means less, I therefore also mean that we as an industry need to aim for less of the toxic marketing messaging and seek to slowly change consumer habits. Less consumption goes hand in hand with a decrease in production to more sustainable levels and a fundamental change in how our industry advertises to its shoppers. Unchecked growth can simply no longer be the beauty industry's sole objective. Now I understand that these words may seem extreme. I have spoken to many people, recorded many podcasts, given many talks on this topic over the last years, and in doing so I've noticed a reluctance from most people to join me in this conversation around a reduction in consumption. Because the sustainable beauty discussion is often spearheaded by brands whose primary mission is is still to sell more products. As the head of sustainable development for one of the world's largest cosmetic brands told me last year, we have simply never even talked about consumption. It will take extreme bravery from every stakeholder in the beauty industry to change its aims from continued growth in sales to conscious consumerism. Brands will need to consider how they can sustainably serve their customers and still prosperity. Retailers will need to reconsider stocking brands that don't meet sustainability principles. Journalists will need to stop prioritizing the flood of press releases for new product launches. We've covered all of these topics and more here on the podcast before. I can only encourage you to start having these conversations within your organization. Planetary Care must surpass our insatiable need to grow our unsustainable industry. The consequences of not doing so many will be profound. So Pillar two is circular and what does that mean? Well, once we lower the volume of resources going into our endless cycle of beauty consumption, we have to try and keep those resources in use as much as possible. And this is where circular beauty comes into play. There's been much talk about circularity in the beauty industry over the last couple of years, but only a few few really innovative players are seriously attempting to move to a more circular model. Much of the discussion has been focused on packaging alone, and there appears to be a fundamental disconnect, a misunderstanding about what circularity even means. The concept of circular beauty is based on the cradle to cradle principles where beauty products are viewed as having a life cycle in a loop. Now most of us have heard of the linear, the straight lined cradle to grave concept Whereas this circular approach leads to resources wherever possible, staying in circulation, and waste that doesn't allow for material recovery is viewed as unacceptable. So there are four key principles to circularity, and we covered all of this in the podcast that Anna Green and I recorded over a year ago. So make sure you go into the show archives and listen to it, because it goes through this in far more detail. But those four principles just running through them, really high level for now is number one is we work with nature. And that first step is that we have to minimize the use of natural resources. Very similar to pillar one, where I was talking about less. So that formulations are made with ingredients that are not over harvested or grown unsustainably. And once we've then minimized the inputs into that loop, we can use natural resources that benefit the environment, for instance, by sequestering carbon through algae production for cosmetics. Principle two is that we then try and keep those resources in use as much as possible. So once we try and keep our resources in circularity, we, for instance, could be using upcycled ingredients or ingredient byproducts. And we're seeking to reuse packaging wherever possible too. Or we're ensuring that our operational water and energy use is renewable. There are elements throughout the entire product lifecycle where we can keep resources in a loop as much as possible, and an obvious solution is to use packaging that can be reused and refilled. However, and I think this is worth noting, we can't keep the cosmetic ingredients in the formulations themselves in use. Which is why making a truly secular formulation will always be challenging. Because as we know, cosmetic ingredients are generally either washed down the drain, they're absorbed by the skin, they're evaporated or sloughed off with dead skin cells, or they are scraped into the trash where they will hopefully decompose, so they're unlikely to be kept in a closed loop system. Now, arguably, beauty brands could sell formulations that can be used in lower quantities or don't need to be reapplied as often, thereby of course, keeping resources out of circulation, rather than aiming for more of a closed loop system for ingredients in the first place. So principle three of circularity is that we're going to design out waste externalities. We want to avoid waste wherever possible, and I'm sure that you can think of plenty of examples where this applies to your beauty products. Like, we could sell formulations in no packaging or refillable packaging, so we avoid creating packaging waste. Or we can minimize waste associated with the extraction of natural ingredients by Looking at which plants can yield the maximum output for the minimum environmental impact, we can also consider the eco design of formulations, examining their environmental impact, particularly when they're flushed down the drain or they're not biodegradable. Ultimately, of course, this principle again ties back to that first pillar of less as we need to minimize consumption of beauty products so that we design out waste externalities by encouraging more sustainable consumption in the first place. And then the final principle of circularity is going to be the hardest one to achieve, because it's all about regenerating natural capital. If you want to keep natural resources in the production of your beauty products, and of course, our students at Formula Botanica do they, then you should be trying to create a net environmental gain somehow. And this is probably arguably the point where the beauty industry struggles the most, because it's simply not really been on the radar screen of quite a lot of beauty brands. And even now, the discussion still revolves mainly around the question of how can we do less harm than that of asking how the beauty industry can build real leadership in sustainability and circularity. Pillar three is green. And what does that mean? Well, once we've embraced a degrowth and a circular model for the beauty industry, pillars one and two, less and circular, the next stage is to introduce green principles to cosmetic chemistry, to product design, to ingredient synthesis and sourcing, and to business operations. And the good news is that much groundwork has already been laid in this area. And indeed, this is where we're starting to see the cosmetics industry take meaningful action, which is great. Many of the large corporations in the sector have put zero policies and environmental management systems in place, or they're moving towards sustainable sourcing and synthesis of their ingredients, or they're building eco design into their formulations, into their products, into their packaging. In fact, I would say that this third pillar of green has seen a flurry of activity in recent years with a conversation around sustainable beauty, focusing on how we can mitigate the industry's existing footprint. It is fantastic to see some beauty brands attempt to bring corporate social responsibility into their operations and start to talk to their customers about the work they're undertaking. Topics such as green chemistry, life cycle assessment, biotech, beauty, biodiversity, regeneration are now being added to the sustainability agenda, albeit by still a limited handful of industry players. But the conversation is there, which is great. And I will say that this pillar offers the easiest and most immediate opportunities to obtain relatively quick sustainability wins for any companies in the beauty industry because it means making change to business as usual. Whereas my two previous Pillars less and circular focused more on a complete business model shift, which will undoubtedly be considerably more challenging to implement. So pillar four, the final pillar, is somewhat controversial and requires us to think more about the distance traveled by us beauty products. I term this pillar local and it embraces also the possibility that we might simply be able to make them ourselves. So we've had pillar one which was less, pillar two which was circular, pillar three which was green, and pillar four is local. Now, although beauty miles similar to food miles are a debunked concept, it's no secret that the beauty industry has an enormous carbon footprint once its products leave the factory gate. In fact, the so called cradle to gate assessment used by some companies when measuring their footprint does not take shipping or usage or disposal into consideration and consequently overlooks quite substantial environmental impacts. So a recent article in Bloomberg shared that the CEO of Unilever said that he had, and I quote, no idea how this billion dollar global company would reduce the carbon emissions of its business when they included those generated by their customers using their products. And he admitted that the energy output of their factories and their distribution network is almost immaterial in comparison to the energy used by their customers who are cooking food and washing clothes and using the cosmetics they sell them, which in total apparently accounts for 60% of Unilever's total carbon footprint. Now this obviously ties in with my last three pillars of less of circular of green, but it also means that we should start to think more localized in terms of our production and consumption. As long as this can be done sustainably, small businesses can play a core role in moving to a more localized economy, particularly as they are the macroeconomies backbone and account for 60 to 70% of jobs in most OECD countries. It's amazing. The enormous rise the enormous global rise of indie beauty brands shows us that consumer appetite is definitely growing when it comes to local artisanal beauty. Furthermore, given their size, indie beauty brands can be flexible, allowing them to trial innovative materials and methods while simultaneously seeking to change consumer habits. Some of the most innovative sustainability projects I have seen in the beauty industry started with an indie beauty brand. And the final component of my fourth pillar, local, involves thinking even closer to home. I would like to see formulation as a skill made available to everyone. Now, humans have been formulating for millennia. The oldest known formulation was found on a 5,000 year old ancient Egyptian scroll and is titled get this how to Transform an Old man into a Youth. And yet, despite this long history of formulation, we have collectively lost these skills by increasingly relying on the beauty industry by for all of our personal care needs and many more. Now that is why Formula Botanica is on a mission to teach the world to formulate. The democratization of formulation allows consumers to take control of their personal care needs as and when they require. So I want you to picture households blending up a family sized batch of lotion, or pressing their own shampoo bars, or whipping up a hand balm. Now I recognize that this mental image may horrify some of the chemists in the beauty industry. The reality is that many people around the world are already formulating for their own needs and that the popularity of formulation is growing exponentially. So as long as home based formulation is undertaken safely and hygienically while using sustainably sourced ingredients, there is no reason why we can't teach the world to formulate for themselves, further driving the sustainable beauty conversation closer to home than it's ever been before. Foreign. No one said any of this would be easy. Leading the cosmetics industry towards sustainability will require a Herculean effort and a radical mindset shift in terms of the sector's overall purpose. I suspect that the road to sustainable beauty will be long and bumpy. Nonetheless, I optimistically envisage a future where we use longer lasting multifunctional formulations obtained from our local refilling stations, provided by eco minded brands, using sustainably sourced ingredients or formulated at home for our own use. I hope you'll join me in looking forward to that day. Thank you for listening to my four Pillars of Sustainable Beauty. This means a lot to me and I would love it if you would share this episode online and tag me in it. Also, remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so in your favorite podcast app. Now leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.