Eco-design at Seppic

Conscious innovation is a cornerstone of our Corporate Social Responsibility program. Promoting renewable and sustainable resources, reducing the carbon impact of our new ingredients, and reducing the impact on biodiversity both upstream and downstream of the value chain, are at the heart of our innovation mission.

What is eco-design?

The purpose of eco-design is to reduce environmental impacts throughout an ingredient's life cycle, for equivalent or better performance.

At Seppic, eco-design is a company project aiming to help all teams systematically integrate environmental aspects into the design and development of ingredients to find the best balance between environmental, social, technical, and economic requirements.

To achieve this, Seppic has created a tool that measures the environmental impacts of an ingredient, such as carbon emissions, water consumption, or waste, throughout its life cycle, (i.e., from raw materials to end of life, including production and transport).

With this tool, it is possible to simulate several possible scenarios and identify how to improve the ingredient.

Eco-design represents a creative and positive approach, a source of innovation, differentiation, and value creation.

Examples of levers used in eco-design

In the eco-design of an ingredient, there are many levers of action:

• Selection of renewable and sustainably sourced raw materials, while limiting their impact on deforestation and ensuring traceability, in compliance with the Nagoya Protocol,
• Reduction of the environmental impact associated with the manufacturing process of the ingredient by implementing green chemistry principles, as we did for our cosmetic active ingredient Aquaxyl™ (see box),
• Reduction of the environmental impact of the ingredient's packaging,
• Reduction of the environmental impact for customers when implementing the ingredient,
• Reduction of the environmental impact linked to the product's end of life (better biodegradability, no ecotoxicity),
• Promotion of a circular economy, which we have done with our bio-sourced emulsifiers Montanov™ with the recycling of vegetable biomass residues from the production process.

To succeed in eco-design, all stakeholders in the design process must be aware of the main issues related to the life cycle stages of ingredients, identify avenues for environmental improvement, and make the link between one avenue and a technical solution.