The double materiality assessment highlighted the importance of resources for creating L'Oréal's beauty products, whether ingredients or primary and secondary packaging materials. The Group sources raw materials from suppliers and transforms them into finished cosmetics, which constitute the outputs intended for consumers. This process makes the responsible management of these resources central to the Group’s sustainability strategy.
In April 2025, L'Oréal published the Environmental Product Design policy, which sets out the Group’s guiding principles in that area. L’Oréal aims to ensure that decisions related to product design are informed by environmental science, using Life Cycle Assessment as the benchmark for product's environment impact assessment. Choices are informed by scientific facts and figures. Beyond minimising the resource use and maximising the circularity of ingredients and packaging, to ensure transparency and build consumers' trust, marketing claims are grounded in evidence-based science. The policy’s guiding principles are set out in the specific policies below for each key area of the value chain.
The Environmental Product Design policy applies to the packaging design strategy, overseen by the Sustainable Packaging Department under the responsibility of Operations. This strategy is framed by the “reduce, replace and recycle” principle (the 3Rs):
These commitments have been translated into concrete targets for 2030. With the L'Oréal for the Future programme, the Group aims to:
For formulas, the direct application of circularity principles, such as recovery and recycling of the finished product, is often less important than the packaging. This is why the environmental impact of formulas is mainly assessed at the end of the product’s life cycle, with a focus on their interaction with ecosystems, notably aquatic environments. Accordingly, L’Oréal’s ambition with regard to formulas focuses on reducing their overall environmental footprint. The Group prioritises ingredient biodegradability and is developing innovative formulas designed with smaller environmental footprints, based in particular on insights from the Green Science programme (see section 4.3.2.3).
As part of its EHS policy, L'Oréal is striving to ensure that its sites reduce and recycle waste (see section 4.3.2.1). The sites operated by L'Oréal produce various types of waste, ranging from packaging waste (cardboard, plastic and metal) to waste generated during the manufacturing and packaging processes, including sludge from wastewater treatment plants. In addition to this industrial waste, they also generate waste from office activities and, to a lesser extent, specific waste from laboratory activities. Each site is aiming to recycle or reuse the waste it generates and reduce waste production, within the broader ambition of zero waste to landfill.
The Group has four different aspects to its action plan aimed at reducing the environmental impact of its packaging: reducing intensity, using recycled materials, promoting circular formats and developing collection and recycling channels.
L'Oréal is working on cutting the weight and volume of packaging to mitigate its impact. By 2030, it aims to reduce the packaging intensity of products by 20% compared to 2019. This objective specifically covers primary and secondary packaging for products manufactured by the Group.
Every year, new initiatives are launched to optimise the use of materials in existing products by making them lighter. L'Oréal is also speeding up the development of refillable formats, encouraging innovation to offer more refill systems, whereby consumers can reduce the use of resources.
