Sustainable

Just like in all other fields, sustainability in cosmetics too has many nuances and unfortunately many companies manage to exploit it commercially, without having the fundamentals to be truly sustainable, thus misleading consumers.

Normally, natural cosmetics, plant-origin products or even biodegradable ones are regarded as sustainable.

But how is sustainability measured?

The best way to define the environmental impact of a product is the methodology Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): a tool that delivers verifiable and reproducible results, as it identifies and quantifies environmental impacts based on scientific cause-and-effect relationships and the standardization set out in UNI EN ISO 14040:2006 and UNI EN ISO 14044:2006.

It’s not enough to know that a product is petroleum-derived to say that it is not sustainable, because another product regarded as more “natural” can have a much larger impact: just consider that the highly sought-after cocoa has caused deforestation disasters with enormous consequences for the ecosystem.