L’Oréal and Veolia join forces to promote the circular economy

Challenge

L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetics and personal care company has a target to improve the environmental footprint of its packaging in line with its sustainable plan “L’Oreal for the Future” and 2030 goals. Identified as the key bottleneck to the implementation of this target, the group was facing a very limited access to high quality Post Consumer Resins, especially HDPE, with no compromise on the consumer safety and product quality.

The company wants to develop a group to group plastic partnership with circular economy being the main motto of this alliance. Nevertheless, incorporating recycled resins to cosmetic packaging is a real challenge because of the quality required. Plastic shouldn’t harm in any way customer’s safety as well as cosmetic recipe and quality.

Veolia's solution

Veolia and L'Oréal have joined forces reducing by 50 to 70% the carbon footprint of cosmetic packaging in a circular economy approach. Veolia has identified, developed, certified* and secured the proper combination of feedstocks and processing steps over the supply chain. Innovative technologies as well as quality control have been implemented in our proprietary plants to consistently meet L'Oréal specifications. Veolia is now delivering on the long run increasing volumes of natural HDPE circular grades complying with the highest quality standards. Engaged in a worldwide long term group to group partnership, Veolia and L'Oréal undertake new challenges with a constant and robust care on eco design, customer safety, sustainable sourcing, and industrial reliability.

“Our ambition is to be a privileged partner for all international brands wishing to develop sustainable packaging processes using recycled plastic all over the world in order to meet the major environmental challenges that face us all. "

will thus supply high-quality recycled plastic for L'Oréal's packaging worldwide. Veolia understood the need for a premium supply of quality plastics with no compromise, and helped unlock the bottleneck to access high quality circular polymers needed.

In addition, Veolia brought quality finetuning, sustainable sourcing, collection schemes and eco-design consultancy to L'Oréal. The group also supported L’Oréal’s sustainable packaging team with Veolia pragmatic and local based expertise
 

Specific Benefits

• CO₂ reducing solution
  Veolia commits to target with its client net zero CO₂ emissions and focuses on deploying solutions.
   
• Long term partnership
  Partners commit on multi year contracts which allows them to structure the sector and to display their CSR commitments over the long term.
  
   

Jacques Playe, Packaging and Development Director of L'Oréal also declared: We are pleased to enter into this partnership with Veolia for the supplying of very high-quality recycled plastic dedicated to cosmetic packaging, because we share the same ambitions and values in terms of sustainable development. This will contribute to our sustainable development programme “L'Oréal for the Future”, enabling us to achieve our 2030 ambitions and significantly improve the environmental footprint of our packaging. We are convinced that we will succeed in promoting the circular economy if we join forces with expert partners to attain common objectives. This approach can be referred to as working in an extended ecosystem.