PARIS — “Sustainability is a team sport,” said Ezgi Barcenas, chief corporate responsibility officer at L’Oréal.
She was speaking from her office in the Paris suburb of Clichy just days before Climate Week NYC begins, in her first interview about strategy since starting the job in March 2024.
At L’Oréal, she wears many hats: Barcenas is a member of L’Oréal’s executive committee, chief executive officer of its foundation, plus steers the company’s Fund for Nature Regeneration, Fund for Women and Climate Emergency Fund. But a guiding force for Cyprus-born Barcenas is the fact that she’s a trained engineer.
“That has really stayed with me over time,” she said. “How I see the world, and how I think of sustainability as a design problem in everything we do — in how we design our products, our processes, our markets — is something that has been very close to me in how I pursued my career ambitions and trying to make it a better world.”
Being at L’Oréal also takes her back to her roots, as it’s a 115-year-old-plus company born from science and innovation. (Her parents were both scientists.)
“I see that curiosity in all of our colleagues — 90,000 colleagues around the world — the pioneering spirit to always ask the questions, to challenge ourselves, to raise the bar, to look for that continuous improvement,” said Barcenas. “It’s really fascinating to be part of such a culture and a group of colleagues that are also pushing themselves, pushing the boundaries, to continue to help serve the infinite diversity of the beauty aspirations and our diverse consumers out there.”
L’Oréal for the Future, the group’s sustainability strategy she oversees, spans four main pillars: lead the climate transition, safeguard nature, drive circularity and support communities. The company has 15 goals within those.
“For us, this is about: How do we build business and community resilience?” said Barcenas. “Innovation and partnerships are big enablers of that.”
A new goal, for instance, is offering water-saving products and technologies to consumers in high water-stressed areas around the globe. L’Oréal Water Saver, created with Gjosa, is a solution.
L’Oréal Water Saver
Courtesy
“We’re starting to think: How can we bring that to greater scale?” said Barcenas. “What does the shampoo of the future look like?”
Earlier this year, she also oversaw the Sustainable Innovation Accelerator’s launch, with an endowment of 100 million euros over five years, to step up new breakthrough technologies.
“In everything I do, I look for solutions and I work with our teams to ask for the solutions,” said Barcenas. She explained key is sending demand signals to the market, to be very transparent about L’Oréal’s aspirations, goals, vision, as well as challenges.
L’Oréal, with its 4,000 scientists and researchers, has tremendous internal capabilities.
“But at the same time, we also know that we have to turn to our ecosystem and find those partnerships outside that will help us tackle those technical challenges, break those ceilings and find new ways to bring new ingredients and new packaging solutions, to think through greater transparency and traceability in our supply chain,” said Barcenas.
That’s where the Sustainable Innovation Accelerator helps.
“We very clearly listed our challenges,” said Barcenas. “For us, it’s not just about sourcing the first set of cohorts and identifying the first set of start-ups and partners that are going to come in through the program, but actually to send those demand signals into the market and to seed what I would call ‘innovation ecosystems’ around the world.”
Other large companies are facing similar sustainability challenges and seeking answers, so there is predictable growth in solutions to come.
L’Oréal partnered with Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, which helps to source the applications that remain open until Sept. 30, plus select and curate them.
“We’re mobilizing a lot of different teams inside our company in different zones and markets, because a lot of the challenges could be very local and market-specific,” said Barcenas, describing sustainability as a transversal function. “We want to tap into those innovation systems everywhere around the world.”
The idea is to pilot the solutions and ultimately bring them to scale. “This is one of the biggest challenges-slash-opportunities that is out there for sustainability right now,” she said.
L’Oréal has already begun. Last September, the group announced it had participated in a 35-million-euro funding round for start-up French company Abolis Biotechnologies in the quest to create purpose-made, sustainable ingredients produced at scale.
The deal was part of a three-way partnership. Evonik CVC, a global specialty manufacturer that’s a long-standing partner of L’Oréal, took a minority share in Abolis, too. L’Oréal, Abolis and Evonik together aim to discover, develop and manufacture innovative, sustainable ingredients for beauty products and more.
Biotechnology is a sustainability solution at L’Oréal.
Photo by Philippe Gotteland/Courtesy of L’Oréal
Scale, according to Barcenas, is “that transformative power that we can bring to the market.”
Other upcoming goals include those in line with the 1.5-degree trajectory by 2030 and net-zero science-based target by 2050.
“There’s a lot that we have to do,” said Barcenas. “If you look at our scope 1 and 2 [carbon] emissions, we’ve done tremendous effort, but scope 3 still remains a big challenge, both upstream and downstream. So how we work with our supply chain partners is a big piece of it.”
That’s why in mid-November 2024, L’Oréal and Chenavari Investment jointly launched Solstice, a 50-million-euro debt fund created to help suppliers accelerate their significant industrial projects’ decarbonization.
“As you’re talking about decarbonization and mitigation, we should not forget the adaptation and resilience component, as well,” said Barcenas.
That’s where a separate fund — Fund for Nature Regeneration, announced in 2020 — is at play.
“A lot of projects have been funded through the program, and what we’re looking to learn is how does environmental performance combine with financial performance?” she explained. “We’re looking to learn what it means, and where we can support those projects around the world.”
L’Oréal keeps gleaning knowledge from its efforts linked to circularity, including improving recycled product contents and packaging solutions that are both sustainable and desirable.
The company just completed the first year of its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD, for 2024.
“This is a fantastic step forward. We’ve done many years of voluntary reporting or mandatory reporting, depending on different markets that we operate in,” said Barcenas. “But for us, what’s really fascinating about this development is not only looking at historical performance and disclosing how we’ve done over the past year. But also putting in place the systems, the reporting processes, to continue to raise the auditability, quality, consistency of extra-financial data, and to bring them to the same levels of financial data, so that we can do better performance planning and monitoring looking forward.”
Barcenas takes a 360-degree scope to navigate and understand a swiftly changing world today, while imaging the future of beauty and working toward it.
“That allows you to integrate sustainability across the business,” she said.
Barcenas and her team participate in different industry and professional groups, which is useful for benchmarking and can lead to non-linear thinking that helps connect the dots of sustainability solutions.
“As a global company, we have the unique opportunity to learn from around the world,” she said. “In sustainability, you learn to be resilient, to always look for what is next.”
That goes hand-in-hand with L’Oréal’s pioneering spirit, continued Barcenas.
“There is that shared sense of commitment, and those core values are essential, they are the cornerstone of our legacy, but also our long-term success,” she said. “Those convictions drive us forward.”