SOCIAL LIFE CYCLE ASSESMENT METHODOLOGY FOR A COSMETIC PRODUCT

Charles Duclaux (1), Sara Russo Garrido (2), Alessandra Zamagni (3), Elisabeth Ekener Petersen (4), Ania Dubois-Iorgulescu (5), Andreas Ciroth (6) (1) : L’Oréal (2) : CIRAIG (3) : ENEA (4) : Royal Institute of Technology ... [ view full abstract ]

Charles Duclaux (1), Sara Russo Garrido (2), Alessandra Zamagni (3), Elisabeth Ekener Petersen (4), Ania Dubois-Iorgulescu (5), Andreas Ciroth (6)
(1) : L’Oréal
(2) : CIRAIG
(3) : ENEA
(4) : Royal Institute of Technology
(5) : UFRJ
(6) : GreenDelta

Corporations and their stakeholders are increasingly interested in the social impacts within the product value chains. Consequently, the purpose of this work is to present an objective methodology, and to report the social impact of cosmetic products during their entire life cycle.

Methodologies for assessing potential impacts are available since ten years, but a number of these are not adapted to the cosmetic sector or are biased in their assessment of each social issues. This specific methodology development involved multiple internal and external stakeholders for L’Oréal, who have been selected to ensure a complementary and relevant panel to address the risks of the method to develop.

There are five main phases in the methodology:
• The definition of the system boundaries addressed by the methodology
• The selection of appropriate impact categories (“social issues”) and subcategories, and the essential specifications needed to evaluate them for the cosmetic industry
• Definition of grades in relation with the data availability
• Evaluation of a quantitative value

Four social topic categories were defined which gathered nineteen indicators associated to twelve impact subcategories: fair methods, fundamental human rights, health & safety, social improvement / community development. The results presented by different methods of aggregation (by stakeholder category; by main impact category; by life cycle stage) in order to use them for further decision analysis.

A complementary approach to address positive social potentials impact of products has been integrated into the methodology.

An analysis to measure the reliability of the method was completed two products:
• A BB Cream produced in France;
• A Shampoo produced in the US

The final report details the assessment limits and the main findings by using this methodology.

Keywords: Social impact assessment, cosmetic industry, social life cycle assessment, stakeholders, assessmentmethod, positive impact.