Responsibility
With L’Oréal for the Future, we have placed social and environmental performance at the heart of our commitment. Together with our stakeholders, we act in favour of responsible beauty.
Alexandra Palt
Chief Corporate Sustainability Officer and L’Oréal Foundation
2021 was the first year of implementation for our new sustainable development programme, L’Oréal for the Future. This is an area in which the Group has made considerable progress over the past two decades. Faced with challenges of unprecedented scope, we intend to take our commitment even further by combining our efforts with those of all players in our ecosystem to collectively adopt more sustainable practices.
L’Oréal for the Future
Sustainable development: new commitments for 2030
The 2020 launch of L’Oréal for the Future was the dawn of a new phase. The programme embodies the Group’s vision of corporate citizenship and its determination to assume greater responsibility—showing the world that companies have a concrete role to play in rising to the challenges of our time.
The programme focuses on transforming our business to operate within "planetary boundaries" as defined by environmental science, while making concrete contributions to addressing the most urgent environmental and social issues. To that end, L’Oréal supports highly vulnerable women and invests in ecosystem regeneration and in growing the circular economy.
By committing to this far-reaching transformation, L’Oréal has positioned itself as a catalyst for change in the beauty industry and beyond.
Highlights
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L’Oréal goes above and beyond with CO2 reduction goals
With the climate emergency increasingly dire, L’Oréal has committed to action via its L’Oréal for the Future programme. The Group is particularly focused on ramping up its efforts to combat climate change and mobilising its stakeholders to significantly reduce the impact of its products.
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L’Oréal supports highly vulnerable women
Women all over the world have been and continue to be disproportionately affected by the social and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The L’Oréal Fund for Women aims to help them.
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Informative labels for more sustainable consumption
To better inform consumers, L’Oréal developed a labelling system for the social and environmental impact of its products, graded from A to E. It takes 14 planetary impacts into account, each of which is measured at every stage in the product lifecycle. Launched for rinse-out products in France by Garnier in 2020, the labelling system was rolled out to several European countries in 2021, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia. The Group will continue to expand the system to other brands, markets and product categories. At the same time, L’Oréal, Henkel, LVMH, Natura & Co and Unilever announced the creation of a consortium open to all beauty industry companies to collectively develop a shared assessment and rating system for the environmental impact of beauty products. The goal is to provide consumers with clear, transparent and comparable information to encourage more sustainable consumption choices. By the end of 2021, the consortium included several dozen members.
Impact investing: supporting rewilding in the United Kingdom
As part of its L’Oréal for the Future programme, the Group announced the creation of the €50 million L’Oréal Fund for Nature Regeneration. The first project the impact investment fund backed in 2021 is one run by the Real Wild Estates Company (RWEC), based in the United Kingdom. It aims to restore land depleted by intensive farming by rewilding natural areas in one of the countries most heavily impacted by the loss of biodiversity. RWEC will restore more than 50,000 hectares of land, creating more than 1,000 direct jobs in environmental management, ecotourism and agroecology.
Fighting inequality: guaranteeing a living wage
L’Oréal has committed to guaranteeing a living wage for all of its employees worldwide—paying an amount that covers their basic needs (such as housing, food, and healthcare) and those of their dependents. In 2021, the Group decided to expand this initiative to include strategic suppliers by urging them to follow the same wage policy for their own employees. Mieke Van de Capelle, of Firmenich group, a long-standing partner and L’Oréal’s leading fragrance supplier, tells us more about this commitment and the importance of working together to create a snowball effect and raise the standard of living for as many people as possible.
L’Oréal Citizen
Citizen Day: a day of volunteering for the greater good
Every year since 2010, Citizen Day has given L’Oréal employees an opportunity to volunteer a workday of their time to supporting social or environmental charities and their beneficiaries.
DiscoverThe L’Oréal Corporate Foundation
The L’Oréal Foundation stands with women
The L’Oréal Foundation is committed to helping women achieve their full potential and have a positive impact on society by offering support in three areas: scientific research, inclusive beauty and climate action.
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