In July 22, the company announced that it has achieved carbon neutrality across all sites in its North Asian zone. This included all operated sites, plants, distribution centres, offices and research and innovation centres spanning five geographic markets: China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
“From today, in North Asia, each L’Oréal product is produced and stored in plants and warehouses that are carbon neutral,” said Pankaj Gupta, SVP of L’Oréal North Asia and China operations.
“Going forward, we will further collaborate with our stakeholders to reduce CO2 emissions along the entire industry value chain through product innovation and consumer empowerment programs, transportation upgrading and collaboration with strategic suppliers.”
Speaking to CosmeticsDesign-Asia, Gupta said: “Yes, we have set a clear roadmap for our success to be replicated.”
“For climate change to be fought there needs to be a concerted effort by every organisation, across all spectrums, everywhere, to join together, to share best practices, to learn from each other, and to treat this threat with the utmost urgency,” he continued.
“We hope L’Oréal North Asia Zone will be a good example of not only efforts fostered by the wider company, but also the industry globally.”
This was a remarkable achievement given the challenges associated with having a diverse collection of sites under the L’Oréal banner.
“Manufacturing sites, for example, require comparatively significant energy consumption, whilst offices that tend to be smaller in size while located in commercial buildings share the same electricity source with other building users and therefore enjoy the pooling resources. Another example is some of our campuses require not only electricity but also steam for heating in daily operations.”
Gupta explained that the firm has to tailor solutions to each of its sites and implemented them over the course of years, which he broke down into three categories.
This included on-site sustainable energy generation sources like solar panels; on-site facilities that convert sustainable energy sources such as biogas to electricity; lastly, source the “most sincere sustainable energy resources” to support local sustainable power stations.
Gupta reiterated that L’Oréal has pledged that all sites will follow North Asia’s example by 2025.
“By 2025, all sites in the Group will do so by improving energy efficiency and using 100% renewable energy according to the public commitment we made in 2020 when L’Oréal for the Future launched.”
Next, the company will be working towards its 2030 goals.
“L’Oréal for The Future sets concrete goals guiding us as next steps to further our efforts in reducing indirect CO2 emissions that are related to using and transporting our products and collaborating with our strategic suppliers to reduce their direct CO2 emissions. Our team is striving to reach these goals by 2030 to reduce emissions along the entire value chain,” said Gupta.
Some of the initiatives are already underway, including the partnership between L'Oréal Hong Kong and Watson to expand its citywide recycling programme and enable local beauty consumers to recycle their empty cosmetics containers.