The Environmental and Social Impact of Products
More and more of you are determined to take action in response to the ecological and social crises facing our planet, by making informed choices about what you consume. Understanding the impacts of your decisions is a big step toward a responsible approach. We created the Green Impact Index to help you do just that. The goal of the Index is to inform you about the social and environmental impact of our products. It will also help us continuously improve their eco-social design.
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What do we mean by the environmental impact of a product?
Every stage of the life cycle of a cosmetic or family healthcare product generates impacts on the environment.
No product, even if it claims to be “green” or “environmentally friendly,” is entirely neutral with regard to the environment. That’s because all products need raw materials and energy to produce and transport them, and sometimes to use them as well; and one day, they become waste, which needs to be recycled or disposed of.
All of that generates impacts on the environment to some degree, and those impacts affect the quality of the air, water, natural resources and human health. By studying a product’s life cycle and quantifying each of those impacts very precisely, we identify leverage for reducing them to the absolute minimum.
The Green Impact Index, the tool for measuring the social and environmental impact of dermo-cosmetic and family healthcare products designed by Green Mission Pierre Fabre (the group’s entity dedicated to naturalness and sustainable development), focuses on 14 environmental criteria to assess their real impact on the planet.
The three major impacts of a product on the environment
Carbon footprint
Corresponds to the amount of greenhouse gas (CO2) emitted throughout the product’s life cycle. CO2emissions contribute to global warming and climate change: cutting them is therefore essential. For example, a good score for packaging-related CO2 emissions is somewhere between 0 and 100g CO2 equivalent per liter of product. The Pierre Fabre group’s portfolio currently contains around 15 packaging models whose carbon impact falls within that range, and we’re working hard to improve the others.
Another lever is the naturalness of our formulas, which allows us to limit the use of materials of petrochemical origin.
Boosting the naturalness of our formulas means finding natural, renewable alternatives for petrochemical materials—in other words, those derived from fossil fuels—, making sure that the conditions in which those alternatives are cultivated or collected respect biodiversity. To assess how natural an ingredient is, we identify the resource and its origin before analyzing all the stages involved in its production. We also use an approach to calculate the naturalness of raw materials based on the ISO 16128 standard, an internationally recognized guideline.
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Water footprint
Corresponds to the amount of water used to produce a product’s components and packaging, and for its manufacture, as well as the water consumed when it is used (as an example, your shower accounts for about 60% of your shampoo’s water footprint). We can’t control how long you spend in the shower, so when we study a product’s environmental impact, we don’t include this use phase. We made the decision to focus on those areas we’re responsible for and our levers for action, not yours.
Aquatic ecotoxicity
Refers to the pollution sustained by water bodies and aquatic ecosystems due to the ingredients found in wastewater, regardless of whether it comes from a product’s manufacture or end-of-life treatment, and the wastewater from your shower released by water treatment plants… This pollution leads to eutrophication, i.e. an accumulation of nutrients in aquatic environments and, consequently, an overabundance of plants and algae, followed by oxygen depletion which eventually “chokes” the entire ecosystem. Certain species disappear and the water body may gradually dry up.
We strive to increase the biodegradability of our formulas by selecting ingredients which are themselves biodegradable, and withdrawing any inhibitor ingredients which interfere with the biodegradation process.
For dermo-cosmetic products, we study biodegradability in the specific conditions of a water treatment plant, since that’s where most of their residue ends up, using the OECD 301B test.
A formula is said to be “biodegradable” if its organic compounds are capable of being decomposed by 60% within 28 days by microorganisms, and “readily biodegradable” if they are decomposed in 10 days.
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