Challenge

According to the Capgemini Research Institute, 42% of consumers are interested in buying brands that concentrate on circular and sustainable practices. Instead of acting alone and competing on an important consumer concern, 71 small and large cosmetics and personal care companies, as well as professional associations from four continents, have joined forces to form the EcoBeautyScore Consortium, aiming to develop an industry-wide and global environmental impact assessment and scoring system for cosmetics products. The challenge is to propose, on each packaging, a score to inform consumers about the environmental footprint of the product.

Solution

To achieve this objective, the EBS Consortium created working groups with voluntary members to build on four pillars:

1. A shared, scientific method for measuring environmental impacts throughout the life-cycle assessment of products, backed by the principles of the EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF)
2. A shared database of the environmental impact of standard ingredients and raw materials, built using existing databases (e.g. Ecoinvent and Spice) and refined using members' data
3. A tool that enables assessment of the environmental impact of individual products, usable by non-experts. Members will be able to enter their product’s raw materials in the tool to compute carbon footprint, with results on the 16 criteria of the PEF
4. A harmonized scoring system for consumers

EBS has created collaboration among members of the industry and scientific experts and used legal bodies to ensure respect for anti-trust laws, and is helped by Capgemini to orchestrate the consortium.

To facilitate decision-making, 18 full corporate members take part in bi-monthly technical working groups, while the whole consortium reunites every trimester for high-level follow-ups. However, each member of the consortium has the same voting weight, regardless of its size or level of involvement.

Impact

The focus in 2022 was on implementing governance and enabling members to collaboratively set the foundations of the methodologies developed by the consortium, while 2023 has been dedicated to testing those methodologies with actual data, at a large scale with a first tool prototype.

The methodology, database, tool and scoring system are being verified by independent parties and made available to the industry.

Featured in our paper "The “No-Excuse” Opportunities to Tackle Scope 3 Emissions in Manufacturing and Value Chains"