Beauty & Personal Care: Towards a Sustainable Future

Sustainability in Beauty and Personal care (BPC) products is undergoing significant transition in recent years, with regulatory bodies encouraging, and consumers demanding, sustainable eco-friendly ingredients in daily use products. Many organizations have goals to reduce their plastic footprint by >50% by early 2025.

Green Beauty

Sustainable beauty (Green Beauty) is a buzzword which includes everything from sourcing ingredients ethically to reducing packaging waste and using environmentally friendly production processes. The objective is to create products that not only are effective, but also kind to the animals and our planet.

Consumers are demanding insights on transparency and traceability of ingredients in parallel to desiring to switch to ecofriendly products.

Multiple organizations are developing software scoring systems, which allow them to rate the products by severity of environmental impact, expediting FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification for products and creating novel extended producer responsibility (EPR) policies.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes for packaging already exist around the world. For example, Japan, South Korea, Chile and 25 of the 27 EU Members States are growing in prominence worldwide for EPR schemes, while South Africa, Kenya and Vietnam are in the early stages of setting up new EPR schemes for packaging.

Green Guide

According to the industry, green or sustainable cosmetics are defined as products using natural ingredients produced from renewable raw materials. Most of the time manufacturers’ green claims are not interpreted in the same way by consumers. The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides (FTC green guides) are designed to prevent marketers from making misleading environmental claims and thereby inform consumers more effectively.

The Green Guides were first issued in 1992 and were revised in 1996, 1998, and 2012. The guidance they provide includes:

General principles governing all environmental marketing claims
How consumers are likely to interpret claims and how marketers can substantiate these
How marketers can qualify their claims to avoid deceiving consumers

Working Together

At Fortrea, our experience in handling sustainability can assist data acquisition, data evaluation and change control management in the Beauty and Personal Care Industry. In the past 3 years, we have supported over 10,000 packaging specifications within this market. Fortrea offers a range of services designed to align your sustainability vision and investments with business goals and regulatory requirements. Learn more about our Global Safety and Post-Marketing Services and how we support sustainability and regulatory requirements.

Beauty & Personal Care: Towards a Sustainable Future