36 NATURALS
presence. Natrue also attends the major trade shows for the industry and regularly features the story of brands, making it accessible and relatable for the industry and consumers.
3. EU Ecolabel This voluntary ecolabel scheme was originally developed by the European Commission and its member states back in 1992 and was used for the home care industry to reduce their environmental impact. It was consequently extended to rinse off beauty products but in October 2021 the Commission Decision EU 2021/1870 expanded it to all cosmetic products.3
The scheme is also available
for all sorts of goods and services, such as furniture, textiles, paper and even tourist accommodation. It is considered a tool available to several industries to join the European Green Deal and circular economy, and a way to promote credible and sustainable products. It is also potentially a transparency tool for consumers via the digital product passport functionality it is linked to. There are several criteria that cosmetic
products need to meet in order to get this mark: saving energy, reducing waste (secondary packaging is not allowed and primary packaging needs to be designed for recyclability), using sustainably sourced, biodegradable and low toxicity ingredients, restricted use of hazardous substances and verified performance. The process to get the mark for cosmetic
products is more complex and costly than COSMOS or Natrue. This is because it requires submitting tests and data to the relevant European ministry to verify compliance. This means that out of the over 87,000
products with the Ecolabel mark, only a really small portion is made of cosmetics, all of which are rinse off. However, given the official nature of this scheme it has the potential of becoming a real player.
4. EcoBeauty Score Set up in 2021 and launched in 2022, the
EcoBeauty Score Consortium is a great example of how some leading brands decided to take the green beauty matter into their own hands and collaborate to develop an evaluation system producing an harmonised product scoring based on a multi-parametric impact assessment.4 The calibre of the brands and companies
involved is pretty impressive, starting with L’Oréal, Unilever, Puig, Natura & Co and Amore Pacific, however the consortium is open to any beauty company of any size and even industry organisations like Natural and Organic Health & Beauty Alliance and Cosmetic Toiletry & Perfumery Association. The environmental impacts are based on
the PEF (product environmental footprint) methodology and it will use a simplified LCA for easy access, tapping into a common data base of environmental impacts for ingredients and packaging. The consortium is also keen on having raw materials suppliers joining in
order to provide the very much needed data to calculate the score. The first test products are expected by the
end of the year. I cannot wait to knowing more about this system and how it works.
5. Green Score Developed by the Estée Lauder companies based on some of the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry – namely, principles 4, 6, 7 and 11 - this scoring system has very much a North American flavour to it with the main focus on the ingredients.5 The assessment is quite complex, taking
into account various ingredients hazards with a risk-based approach dependent on the concentration in the final product. The assessment also takes into account the lifecycle of the ingredient and the internal operations for its manufacturing. The ingredients parameters that are used
to calculate the green score are divided into three groups: human health (acute, ocular and dermal toxicity), ecosystem health (bioaccumulation, persistence and aquatic toxicity) and environment (raw material origin, i.e. petroleum or no petroleum; country of origin, certifications, lifecycle assessment availability, greenhouse gases based on supplier survey). When data is not available a default scoring
kicks in to provide a value. Every data comes with a certainty score to give more weight to metrics with higher certainty. There is also a penalty score for ingredients with the lowest possible initial score, in order to discourage its use. Once all the above ingredient parameters
are evaluated, they get mass averaged excluding any water present to give the ingredient green score. The same system is applied to calculate the formula green score by mass averaging the ingredients green scores excluding water. The higher the score the better the profile.
A formula’s green scores can also be used to decide if it needs reformulating by using ingredients with lower green scores or for ingredients selection during new formulation development. It is interesting to compare the green scores
of beeswax (93) and paraffin (83), indicating circularity does not have as much weight as expected, however cyclopentasiloxane has the lowest score at 39, whereas zinc oxide has a score of 42.7. The Green Score framework is still in
working progress as further parameters might be added in the future. We shall see how it will be received by consumers.
6. Green Impact Index French group Pierre Fabre came up with its own social environmental product scoring with a pretty look. It is a colour coded A to D system with blue for A, green for B, yellow for C and red for D.6 This is very easy to understand for
consumers, however it claims is to be the result of considering at least 20 criteria. The criteria are spitted into two main groups to calculate
PERSONAL CARE March 2023
www.personalcaremagazine.com
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