What future for the cosmetics industry after oil?

Is this still an ethical issue? Corporate commitment to sustainable development seems increasingly guided by the reality principle and common sense. The obvious depletion of many natural resources, starting with oil, is forcing companies to reconsider their long-term strategy. “The competitiveness and sustainability of LVMH’s activities depend very directly on our ability to preserve and enhance natural resources,” explained Sylvie Bénard, Environment Director of the LVMH Group.

Like other major groups, the French luxury giant is actively seeking the technological revolutions that will bring the cosmetics industry into a new era.

Oil resources depletion

Oil’s abundance, easy extraction and the breadth of its applications have made it an important resource, and today 400 million tons of oil are used by chemical industries and approximately three-quarters of that amount are used to make plastics. However the peak of oil production probably already occurred, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects that about 30% of the production of existing wells will have vanished by 2020. Of course new oil fields should be discovered, but exploitation costs will skyrocket.

These questions lead the chemical industry to undergo a real revolution combining the anticipation of oil exhaustion together with the drastically reduction of greenhouse gases, and a strong regulatory pressure regarding the toxicology and ecotoxicology related to the use of raw materials.

Green chemistry

Great strides in new forms of industrial synthesis have been made through green chemistry. “Plant or algae-based chemicals might partly replace oil as a raw material. Plant biomass can be converted in biorefineries into glucose and fatty acids, which, in the future, will be able to be used to produce monomers and polymers,” says Frédéric Bonté, Director of Scientific Communication at LVMH Recherche.

While today, biomass represents a huge renewable resources, its use for industry purposes imply to preserve its use a food source.

In the 1990s early research efforts focused on bio-polymers, a sector that is now dramatically booming as it is forecasted to grow by 23,000% from 2005 to 2015. More recently, technological roadmaps were established setting out a limited list of key precursor chemicals to which scientific research should be directed.

“Today, bio-based materials are serious alternatives to mass produced or specialty chemical intermediates that are offered by the petrochemical industry,” deems Frédérique Lafosse, CEO of Soliance. However, she warns they “cannot be disconnected from their industrial environment, or from scientific and technical processes and techniques used to obtain them and produce them in a sound manner.”

Very concretely, Carine Alfos, Innovation Director at Iterg, highlighted the development of green oleochemistry, which already represents 7% of the world market of vegetable oils (excluding saponification and biodiesel).

“In the U.S., research is being conducted on several oilseed species whose oil has a specific fatty acid profile: jojoba, Crambe abyssinica, Lesquerella, Vernonia, Cuphea, Limnanthes. In Europe, several oilseeds with a particular fatty acid profile have begun to gain recognition in the domain of green chemistry: erucic rapeseed, low linolenic rapeseed or high oleic rapeseed, linseed, oleic sunflower and, maybe in the future, stearic sunflower. The fatty acid composition of their oils offer many opportunities: biofuels, lubricants, detergents, plastics, paints, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.”

Of course, there are numerous technical difficulties, but so far these alternatives have mainly suffered from a lack of competitiveness compared to ingredients derived from petrochemicals. A financial mechanics that could be reversed in the medium term.