Carbon Balanced, Towards A Low Carbon Business Model

In the face of the climate emergency, the Group has committed to balance its residual CO2 emissions (Scope 1 and 2, downstream transport and finished products) by the end of 2020, in order to become a Carbon Balanced company. This ambition reinforces L’Oréal’s low carbon strategy, which takes a dual approach to reducing the Group’s carbon footprint – lowering the emissions linked to its industrial and logistics activities while balancing residual emissions.

To pursue and evaluate this initiative, L’Oréal has developed, with the support of a committee of independent experts - carbon specialists - the Carbon Balanced Program Framework, a methodology designed to identify, develop and monitor projects. This document is shared with all the Group’s suppliers, project developers and relevant verification organisations. The projects launched and evaluated by the Group are structured around three pillars, with methodologies developed by international standards and the Kyoto Protocol – improving energy efficiency, promoting productive and low carbon farming practices, and developing forestry and agroforestry programmes.

For example, since 2016, L’Oréal has supported the efforts of the social enterprise Nafa Naana, which has enabled more than 5,000 women collectors of shea nuts in the south-west region of Burkina Faso to gain access to improved cooking equipment. This helps to fight against fuel poverty and its consequences on household income and deforestation. In 2019, the project prevented the emission of more than 10,500 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and avoided the felling of 5,000 tonnes of timber traditionally taken from forests.

Also in 2019, L’Oréal pursued an exchange with external experts on questions relating to the mechanisms of carbon insetting, and on accounting methodologies for reducing Scope 3 emissions, by participating in the Value Chain Intervention Consortium hosted by the Gold Standard. The eight energy and forestry projects implemented since 2015 have enabled the generation of carbon gains of up to 116,720 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.