L’Oréal and Quantis have teamed up to bring cosmetic and personal care companies a science-based platform which allows ecodesign to be integrated into the packaging development process.
The Sustainable Packaging Initiative for Cosmetics (SPICE), co-founded by global beauty group L’Oréal and leading sustainability consulting firm Quantis, describe the SPICE Tool as an intuitive tool which “makes robust environmental data accessible to packaging designers, empowering them to develop more resilient packaging.”
It can be used to measure the environmental footprint of any cosmetics packaging; the platform was co-developed by 25 leading beauty companies based on the “comprehensive and science-driven SPICE Methodology“. The SPICE Tool assesses a pack’s performance across each lifecycle stage (from raw materials to end-of-life), it then calculates a holistic environmental footprint based on 16 impact categories, and then provides an aggregated score so that different packaging products can be easily compared.
Image credit: SPICE Tool
“As the co-founder of SPICE, L’Oréal is proud to see the initiative uniting the cosmetics industry around a shared vision of sustainable packaging,” adds Philippe Bonningue, Group Global Director of Sustainable Packaging at L’Oréal. “For more than a decade, we have been committed to innovating our packaging toward sustainability. We are pleased to share this experience to help develop the SPICE Tool so that, together, we can drive the industry’s sustainable transformation.”
In addition to the SPICE Tool, the initiative has released other valuable resources to support ecodesign decision making and improve the environmental performance of the entire packaging value chain:
- Guidelines for environmental claims: cosmetics-specific guidance that establishes minimum requirements and strong recommendations for providing credible packaging sustainability information to consumers and other audiences.
- Environmental datasets: metrics to populate the SPICE Tool database.
- The SPICE Primer: a communications brief presenting the mission and work of SPICE
Find out more about The SPICE Tool here.
