Supply Chain

Beauty Industry Leaders Partner with EcoVadis to Launch Responsible Beauty Initiative

In an effort to accelerate improvement on ethical social and environmental performance throughout the beauty supply chain, Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher, L’Oréal and EcoVadis have launched the Responsible Beauty Initiative (RBI).

By Sustainable Brands | Published 7 years ago | About a 2 minute read

In an effort to accelerate improvement on ethical social and environmental performance throughout the beauty supply chain, Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher, L’Oréal and EcoVadis have launched the Responsible Beauty Initiative (RBI). The 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.

The RBI aims to boost sustainability in members’ supply chains, while ensuring industry suppliers have sound ethical, social and environmental business practices in place. This will be achieved by driving a common understanding of sustainability performance across the industry, sharing best practices and processes and leveraging common tools to create efficiencies and benefits for suppliers.

The Responsible Beauty Initiative is built on a Corporate Social Responsibility rating platform operated by EcoVadis and functions as a common foundation for supplier assessment and interaction. The platform allows for the engagement of suppliers via an independent expert and offers easy-to-use ratings and benchmarks of suppliers’ CSR performance and practices across four themes — environment, social, ethics and supply chain. The ratings are based on a robust methodology that analyzes documents and multi-stakeholder inputs, as well as international standards such as the Global Reporting Index (GRI), ISO 26000 and the Global Compact principles.

Further benefits of the RBI include the creation of a thorough CSR assessment adapted to each supplier’s sector size and location, a Scorecard of results for suppliers with detailed feedback across all themes and collaborative tools to help guide improvements. The platform makes it easy to share Scorecard results with multiple stakeholders — any or all members of RBI, the EcoVadis network and beyond — while avoiding 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 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’s 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.

In addition to RBI members, over 175 industry leaders such as Nestlé, GSK, Heineken, Michelin, Johnson & Johnson, Schneider Electric, Salesforce, BASF, JLL and Subway use EcoVadis to reduce risk, drive innovation and foster transparency and trust among over 35,000 trading partners.