L’Oréal reiterates sustainability importance with ‘zero deforestation’ commitment

15-Jan-2014 - Last updated on 15-Jan-2014 at 12:07 GMT

Alexandra Palt discusses L'Oréal's new sustainability commitment

L’Oréal has reiterated its commitment to sustainability by announcing that it has put a ‘zero deforestation’ rule in place when sourcing raw materials.

As part of its Sharing Beauty with All commitment, the cosmetics manufacturer commits to source 100% renewable raw materials from sustainable sources by 2020 and make sure that none of its products are linked to deforestation.

To ensure this, and conscious that some agricultural commodities may lead to deforestation, L’Oréal has been implementing specific action plans as regards to the sustainable sourcing of palm oil, soya oil and wood fiber-based products since 2007.

Sustainable development

“L'Oréal has a long history in sustainable development and commitments for societal improvements and now we want to go a step further,” says director of CSR and Sustainability Alexandra Palt.

Palt explains that this step is part of the role of a company nowadays, and is convinced that it can have a positive impact on society and on environment.

“We decided to make commitments for 2020, which are called ‘Sharing beauty with all’ and which will enable us to really transform our business to take better into account environmental and social preoccupations,” she continues.

"We will continue to innovate sustainably, we will produce sustainably by having taken commitments to reduce our environmental footprint by 60% until 2020, and we are very much taking this to a new step of development [to] encourage our consumer to make sustainable lifestyle choices.”

Plan of action

There are already many examples within the Group of putting this plan into action.

Garnier tried to raise the concept of recycling behaviour in consumer’s minds so that it became ‘normal’ behaviour.

Another brand, Biotherm, are taking into account its water footprint and trying to raise in the consumer’s minds about water footprint, as well as also revisiting its own formular to have more positive water footprint.

“Consumers and stakeholders can expect from L'Oréal that we will be accountable for our commitments which are all commitments with concrete numbers and indicators KPAS and we will have a panel of independant experts that will evaluate and verify our progress against this KPAS,” adds Palt.

“This panel is going to be chaired by José María Figueres who is the former president of Costa Rica and a very renowned expert on sustainable development and there are other international experts on social and environmental issues who are part of this panel.”