Four leaders in the beauty industry—Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher, L'Oréal—and EcoVadis, the leader in supply chain sustainability ratings, have launched the “Responsible Beauty Initiative” (RBI). This initiative is about accelerating and going a step further on ethical, social and environmental performance and progress throughout the beauty supply chain.
The Responsible Beauty Initiative brings together the global beauty industry in a collaborative effort to strengthen sustainable practices, improve environmental footprint and social impacts and maximize shared value across its collective supply chain.
It will amplify members’ efforts to boost sustainability in their supply chains, while ensuring the suppliers of the industry have sound ethical, social and environmental business practices in place. The RBI will achieve these objectives by:
- Drive a common understanding of sustainability performance across the industry.
- Share best practices and processes.
- Leverage common tools to create efficiencies and benefits for suppliers.
The Responsible Beauty Initiative is built on a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rating platform, operated by EcoVadis, as a common foundation for supplier assessment and interaction. Benefits include:
- Engagement of suppliers via an independent expert, EcoVadis, who meets the highest standards of expertise, certifications on data security and confidentiality (ISO 27000), as well as experience with other sector initiatives, international presence and a multi-language platform.
- Easy to use ratings and benchmarks of suppliers’ CSR performance and practices on a 0 to 100 scale across four themes (environment, social, ethics and supply chain), based on a robust methodology that analyzes documents and multi-stakeholder inputs, and is based on international standards such as the Global Reporting Index (GRI), ISO 26000 and the Global Compact principles.
- A thorough CSR assessment adapted to each supplier’s sector, size and location, and a Scorecard of results for suppliers, with detailed feedback across all themes, and collaborative tools to help guide improvements.
- Efficient and precise sharing of Scorecard results to multiple stakeholders (e.g. to any or all members of RBI, the EcoVadis network and beyond), to avoid duplicated efforts for suppliers.
“EcoVadis is impressed by the leadership and dedication to collaborate by these four companies,” said Pierre-Francois Thaler, co-CEO of EcoVadis.“As EcoVadis’ fourth sector initiative, Responsible Beauty Initiative (RBI) will benefit from learnings of those who preceded them, including Together for Sustainability, E-Tasc and Railsponsible. RBI members are well-positioned to leverage their collaboration to create value and competitive advantage by advancing sustainability performance in its shared global supply chains.”
The Responsible Beauty Initiative will address the unique opportunities and challenges of the beauty industry global supply chains and will aim to drive the continuous improvement of sustainability practices. The founding members will sign the charter to officially launch RBI and invite other companies and suppliers in the industry to join.
