ALEXANDRA PALT

CEO of the L’Oréal Foundation

Alexandra Palt, CEO of the L’Oréal Foundation, is ranked as one of the top international net zero speakers in the world. Her work at the cosmetics giant involved several successful sustainability and community-based strategies that benefited different communities. By uniting stakeholders, management, international teams and other bodies, Alexandra believes that businesses can drastically reduce their climate impact on our planet and invest more in community efforts. In this exciting interview, learn more about Alexandra Palt and her role in sustainability.

As the CEO of the Fondation L’Oréal, what does your role involve?

“I have two roles at L’Oréal. So, one is to lead the transition to a new business model with all my colleagues and internal partners. I am also in charge of the outside contribution to society.

“Historically, the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the US, was much more engaged in philanthropy with higher amounts of money, less work on the internal transformation. The Europeans were a little bit the other way around. We do everything internally, but it is the welfare state who takes care of the difficulties that society faces.

“So, in my role, I lead the entire philanthropic commitment to society, and I lead the foundations’ work. We also have a charitable endowment fund for women where we support grassroots and community organisations all around the world. Also, every brand that L’Oréal has, has a commitment to contribute to society. I try to give the best strategic orientations to this causes.”

The Sharing Beauty with All commitment positioned L’Oréal as a sustainability champion. To date, what has been your proudest achievement with the campaign?

“So, Sharing Beauty with All finished in 2020, and we achieved most of our targets. We outperformed on some of them, like our carbon footprint. We reduced the carbon footprint of our industrial activity by 80% since 2005, so that was really a huge, huge achievement

“Some other goals were more difficult, and, you know, environmental science is always moving. So, at times we discovered that our approach was not the right way to tackle [climate change] and we had to reformulate and redefine our targets. “On the whole, it was very, very successful.

And so, in 2020 we announced the next generation of sustainability targets, our L’Oréal For the Future strategy. The interesting thing about L’Oréal For the Future is that we didn’t work anymore based on, what is our impact and by how much can we reduce it?

“We looked at it in a different way, we asked, what does the world need from us? So, we took the scientific basis and the planetary boundaries, and we looked at what we had to do so L’Oréal, in 2030, can work within the planetary boundaries? Meaning that we do not take more from this planet than the planet can take.

“Our whole programme was created on this scientific basis and that leads to very, very ambitious targets, of course, because it means 100% recycled plastic, 95% of our ingredient’s bio based or from biotech, and so on. There is a whole transformation ongoing.

“What allowed us to be so ambitious is that we started early, we saw that a lot of things are possible with the right mindset, that people are very mature on sustainability issues and very aware. So, in the whole company, there is a lot of awareness, which allows us to be a lot more ambitious.”

What does the future of sustainability look like for brands like L’Oréal?

“I think every brand, not just L’Oréal, but the future of brands is... sustainability is not going to be on the side. Sustainability is going to be central to everything companies and brands will do.

“So, the step we must take now is to bring the right innovations to the market. That means refills for a cosmetic company, solid shampoos, it’s a lot of different things. We have to bring this innovation; we have to raise awareness.

“Then as a last step, we need to do choice editing, altogether. So, at one point we have to stop bringing to the market products that are not having an improved environmental footprint. That means choice editing, so that there are more sustainable products available, more sustainable offers. “It really is the next level of maturity that companies will have to reach, in the next few years, if we choose to survive as a human species.”

This exclusive interview with Alexandra Palt was conducted by Jack Hayes.