When it comes to cosmetics, the journey from raw materials to the finished product can significantly impact the environment. Manufacturing and raw material selection play crucial roles in this process, making up 19.6% and 22.7% of the products sustainability score1(depending on the product format). It might feel daunting, but designing sustainability into your formulation can make a huge difference.
Many beauty brand owners might not have enough visibility of how impact and emissions can be lowered in the manufacturing process and thus feel like they cannot improve their ‘sustainability score’ further. However, not all is lost, as there are small decisions you can make that lead to big changes.
Using Cold process Emulsifiers or ingredients.
Many emulsifiers used in creams and lotions require the addition heat to help emulsify the water and the oil phase. These types of emulsifiers are called ‘hot-process emulsifiers’. Due to the high thermal energy of water, which usually makes up most of an emulsion, it takes a lot of energy to heat the two phases. After emulsification, manufacturers often must wait for the product sufficiently cooled before subsequent steps, which can take a long time. 95%of the energy used in manufacturing comes from these heating and cooling steps2.
A cold process emulsifier is, as the name suggests, an emulsifier that is able to create emulsions without the use of heat. Simply by choosing to use a cold process emulsifier can significantly cut energy costs. A study done by Rasposo et al found that O/W emulsions using cold process emulsifiers gave a saving of 67% in electrical cost, 36.7% in water cost and 17.1% in total production cost compared to its hot counterparts3.However, they do have limitations, so it’s important to inform your formulator if this is a requirement early on. If you’re flexible with product formats, serums or gel creams are excellent candidates for cold process methods.
.png)
Hot-Warm Process
One of the downsides to using a cold process emulsifier, is that you are only limited to using liquid ingredients. Butters and waxes such as shea butter or cetyl alcohol cannot be used and thus cold process emulsions might not reach a desired texture. Using this method allows incorporation of solid ingredients. It involves heating the oil phase to and only a portion of the water phase, to create a concentrated emulsion, and then cooling the concentrate with the rest of the water phase. This not only save energy as there is less mass to heat up, but also time as it can cool the hot phase faster.
Using upcycled ingredients
Upcycled ingredients refer to by-products of another process that have added value after further processing. Such ingredients have a ‘shared’ carbon impact and thus are inherently lower than if they were to be harvested just for that purpose. Upcycling can also help to reduce waste. Essentially, upcycling maximises our ‘environmental spend’.
Thankfully, due to demand, there has been more research into converting waste product into resources and you can now found many upcycled actives and functionals that you can use in your formulation.
Using bioengineered ingredients
Bioengineered ingredients are created using natural processes. For example fermented ingredients use fermentation to create various molecules, some of which can be extracted to be used in skincare. Bioengineered ingredients reduce the reliance on agricultural feed stock, which have a huge impact on the environment. Within their manufacturing process, only natural ingredients can be used, which reduces the reliance on petrochemicals. Many actives are already being produced via bio-technology and there is lots of research being poured into biotechnological alternatives for more commoditised ingredients such as palm oil.
Choosing degradable or biodegradable ingredients
Some ingredients do not readily degrade or biodegrade such as film formers or acrylate based thickeners. Although there still needs to be a lot more data collection on what ingredients are biodegradable and what isn’t, there are biodegradable options on the market, which you can opt to choose.
Manufacturing as a beauty brand owner has usually been a ‘scope 2’ (indirect impact) headache, but knowing the your options during raw material selection and product development can help you make more sustainable choices.
The most significant impact you can make is during the design phase. Pre-planning and filling out your product brief with sustainability in mind can help you create a beauty range with a lower environmental footprint, as it is difficult to make sustainability switches after the formulation is completed4.
1 Bom, S.; Ribeiro, H.M.; Marto, J. Sustainability Calculator: A Tool to Assess Sustainability in Cosmetic Products. Sustainability 2020, 12,1437.
2 Lin,T.J. Low energy emulsification I: Principles and applications. J. Soc.Cosmet. Chem. 1978, 29, 117–125
3 Raposo,S.; Salgado, A.; Eccleston, G.; Urbano, M.; Ribeiro, H.M. Cold processed oil-in-water emulsions for dermatological purpose: Formulation design and structure analysis. Pharm. Dev. Technol. 2014, 19,417–429.
4 Tamburic, S.; Fröhlich, J.; Mistry, S.; Fischer, L.J.; Barbary, T.; Bunyan, S.; Dufton, E. Sustainability by Reduced Energy Consumption during Manufacturing: The Case of Cosmetic Emulsions. Cosmetics2023, 10, 132. https://doi.org/10.3390/cosmetics10050132
