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| Opportunities & Exposures: Environment |
Green Machine
Dominique Conseil
11/01/2004
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I am fortunate enough to have been the leader of Aveda for almost four years. It
has been an enlightening and inspirational journey. Aveda manufactures beauty
products backed by botanical science. Despite the extra cost of our products,
our customers are not willing to live their lifestyles at the expense of other
people on the planet. Our customers see value in our total-quality
approach.
When I began working here, my challenge became immediately
apparent: to retain the soul of the company even while it grew far beyond the
entrepreneurial venture created by its founder, Horst Rechelbacher. In 1997, he
sold Aveda for $300 million to Estée Lauder, an organization where family values
are still prominent, in order to take the brand to another level. Lauder helped
build manufacturing capacity, open foreign markets and acquire third-party
distributorships, all while honoring Horst’s original mission to set an example
of environmental leadership, to steward the globe and to give back to
society.
We manufacture products from nature—but not at nature’s expense—by
supporting indigenous communities and farmers who have been working with the
land for generations. Our support of Brazil’s Yawanawa tribe, for example, has
helped the people build a new health care facility for their community. Our work
also provides funding for education and training in other areas. We focus on
sustainable development and capacity building. If we cultivated our own
botanicals, we would be taking work and added value away from these communities.
Instead, we are helping to keep their local economies growing, and by purchasing
certain organic materials, we are able to shift a variety of agricultural
processes away from petrochemical materials and toward more natural, sustainable
agricultural systems. Every day we learn about better, more natural
petrochemical ingredient alternatives.
Everything we do is connected to the
philosophies and beliefs upon which the company was originally founded. This
requires us to embrace new systems. For example, we require our research and
development team to undergo a unique ingredient process whenever it conceives a
new product. We call it the Mission Aligned Ingredient Review, and it allows us
to vet our products based on specific environmental criteria.
• We
measure any impact on threatened or endangered species.
• We gauge the
use of petrochemical-based ingredients when plant-based alternatives can be
developed through green chemistry.
• We monitor our reliance on
noncertified-organic resources when certified-organic ones are
available.
• We ensure that total plant- and mineral-based content is
less than 90 percent by weight.
If we find an ingredient is incompatible with
our mission, the R&D team works to find suitable alternatives.
We are
also passionate about our packaging. There are no mandates for the cosmetics
industry for environmentally friendly packaging; everything that we do in this
arena is voluntary. We see our role as acting as the catalyst for change for
everyone in the supply chain. We have asked our suppliers to provide more
post-consumer recycled (PCR) content, and have encouraged our competitors to
perform better in this area as well.
We set new standards with our makeup
packaging within the last year, creating a clamshell package made of 100 percent
recycled newspaper and introducing a nutritional lipstick in a refillable
case—an industry first. Our lipstick sales increased by 40 percent. We recently
redesigned the packaging for our entire shampoo line, and revamped our Brilliant
line, moving from cobalt blue glass (which cannot be recycled) to 100 percent
PCR PET. We saved $150,000 on that project alone.
We have also invested in
wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). We use it for all the
pallets on which we ship products from our manufacturing facility in Blaine,
Minn., to international markets. We have begun using FSC-certified wood for all
our lip pencils and makeup displays.
Our chief challenge is our inability to
develop a strong restorative agenda. We are also still working to move from
traditional means of obtaining energy to cost-effective green alternatives:
wind, solar and others. We are not out to conquer the world. But I believe that
we can change that world by changing the way we do business.
 | Dominique Conseil is president of Aveda, a maker of plant-derived hair care, skin care and makeup products. |
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