Sustainable cosmetics packaging

SABIC’s renew­able poly­mers, includ­ing var­i­ous PP and poly­eth­yl­ene (PE) mate­ri­als, are derived from ani­mal-free and palm oil-free “‘sec­ond gen­er­a­tion”’ renew­able feed­stock, such as tall oil waste from the wood pulp­ing process in the paper indus­try, which is not in direct com­pe­ti­tion with human food and ani­mal feed pro­duc­tion sources.

“The use of renew­able raw mate­ri­als in our prod­uct pack­ag­ing rep­re­sents a major lever for us to reduce our car­bon emis­sions and improve our eco­log­i­cal foot­print,” says Michael Beck­er, Head of Glob­al Pack­ag­ing Devel­op­ment at Beiersdorf.

As part of its CARE BEYOND SKIN Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Agen­da with ambi­tious tar­gets to be imple­ment­ed by 2025, Beiers­dorf wants to make its pack­ag­ing 100 per­cent refill­able, reusable or recy­clable, increase the share of recy­cled mate­r­i­al in plas­tic pack­ag­ing to 30 per­cent and reduce the use of fos­sil-based vir­gin plas­tic by 50 per­cent (com­pared to 2019).
The com­pa­ny’s cer­ti­fied renew­able poly­mers are based on a mass bal­ance approach in com­pli­ance with the wide­ly rec­og­nized Inter­na­tion­al Sus­tain­abil­i­ty & Car­bon Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (ISCC PLUS) scheme. The mass bal­ance is deter­mined to allo­cate the renew­able con­tent used in pro­duc­tion and con­ver­sion of the plas­tic mate­r­i­al to the ulti­mate appli­ca­tion. This allows brand own­ers to high­light and quan­ti­fy the sus­tain­able choice con­sumers can make by pur­chas­ing end prod­ucts pack­aged in renew­able plas­tics. The ISCC Plus accred­i­ta­tion ver­i­fies that the mass bal­ance account­ing fol­lows pre­de­fined and trans­par­ent rules. In addi­tion, the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion also pro­vides trace­abil­i­ty through­out the part­ners’ entire sup­ply chain from the feed­stock to the final product.
More­over, a cra­dle-to-gate life­cy­cle analy­sis has con­firmed the sus­tain­abil­i­ty ele­ments of SABIC’s renew­able mate­ri­als. From sourc­ing the raw feed­stock to pro­duc­ing the poly­mers, each ton of the company’s bio-based PP and PE resin reduces CO₂ emis­sions by an aver­age of 4 kg as com­pared to fos­sil-based vir­gin alter­na­tives, while at the same time cut­ting fos­sil deple­tion by up to 80 percent.