Estée Lauder employs Roctool to boost Clinique’s luxury bottles’ sustainability

17 Sep 2021 --- Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is collaborating with heat and cool surface technology provider Roctool to create eco-friendly packaging solutions for Clinique’s luxury beauty bottles.

“We’re continually investing in our packaging process to help drive more responsible packaging solutions that enable our brands to deliver luxury experiences to our consumers,” says Daniel Ramos, senior vice president, global packaging for ELC. 

“We’re working with industry partners like Roctool to help to improve our packaging design. From there, we’re leveraging our portfolio of brands to implement these practices at scale to be part of the solution and deliver packaging innovations that are better for both our consumers and the planet.”

The new bottle will initially be rolled out across European markets.

Eco-luxury
The collaboration aims to implement new practices across ELC’s brand portfolio as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to advance environmentally sustainable packaging.

Clinique will be the first prestige beauty brand to leverage Roctool’s technology on beauty bottles, beginning with its 200 ml Clarifying Lotion.Clinique will be the first prestige beauty brand to leverage Roctool’s technology on beauty bottles.

Roctool’s heat and cool technology is applied to multiple manufacturing methods, providing significant enhancements to surface finishes without additional steps of decoration. 

For Clinique’s Clarifying Lotion bottles, leveraging this technology eliminates the need for a secondary decoration process, which is replaced by Roctool’s advanced molding technology. 

This process supports a more responsible and simplified packaging approach, including scrap or waste reduction by 10% to 15% in the production process while maintaining the quality of the packaging material.

“When we entered the world of beauty a few years back, we could sense the importance of developing more responsible packaging solutions with our molding technology,” notes Mathieu Boulanger, CEO of Roctool. “We now work with ELC and Clinique to support their efforts in innovation and sustainability.” 

Collaborating on sustainability
ELC is also working with beauty packaging manufacturer Pinard Beauty Pack on its first commercialization of the Roctool technology in Europe. 

“We are working with ELC and Roctool to leverage our combined technical and quality know-how on this development, which is directly in line with our sustainability development targets and CSR policy,” say Thomas and Pierre Olivier Pinard, CEOs of Pinard.

The new bottle will initially be rolled out across European markets.ELC previously collaborated with SABIC and Albéa on its Origins brand “advanced beauty tube pack.” The launch was hailed as the first tube featured in a prestige beauty brand’s range of products that use certified circular polyolefins from SABIC’s Trucircle portfolio.

Prestige packaging revamped
Other prestige brands have also turned more sustainable, with Armani Beauty unveiling a refillable perfume bottle for its My Way perfume. The design of the fragrance bottle is in line with the Italian luxury brand’s five-year commitment to reducing its carbon footprint by 25 percent, along with achieving carbon neutrality for all its products.

Meanwhile, L’Oréal’s brand Biotherm reduced packaging waste by piloting its first refillable skin care bottle for the Life Plankton Elixir Blue Fountain serum. 

LVMH Perfumes & Cosmetics collaborated with global specialty material provider Eastman to develop packaging that will eliminate the use of virgin plastic from its product lines. Moreover, LVMH is partnering with Canopy to support forest conservation.

The L’Occitane group pledged to source all plant-based ingredients from biodiversity-positive sources and reduce plastic used for its packaging by 10 percent by 2025. The move is part of its new guiding principles for its biodiversity strategy, the high point of its visit to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in Marseille, France. 

Recently, Dr. Suvi Haimi, CEO and co-founder of Sulapac spoke to PackagingInsights about environmental sustainability being a must for cosmetic packaging while also maintaining functional and aesthetically beautiful to offer a true alternative to conventional solutions.

By Kristiana Lalou