Saturday is World Environment Day, and the beauty industry is one that still has many sustainability strides to make in order to be more friendly to our planet (research shows the number of shampoo bottles thrown out in the United States every year could fill 1,164 football fields!). However, these efforts aren’t just limited to plastic use and packaging waste; they’re also aiming to make the world a better place for all of us by reducing CO2 emissions, restoring trees and forests, and so much more.
And thanks to brands like Dove helping to achieve these big goals—it announced its Dove Forest Restoration Project commitment this morning—we can expect real transformation. “Can we really celebrate beauty if it comes at the cost of the planet? The answer is no,” says Alessandro Manfredi, global executive vice president of Dove. “We must demand action and care that goes further, both from ourselves and from the beauty industry at large. As a global brand with care at our core, we have a responsibility to use our platforms to drive change and positively impact the world around us. The Dove Forest Restoration Project builds on our commitments to caring for our planet and caring about how we make our products and what goes into them. With this long-term initiative, we extend this care to improving the health of the planet, striving for a more sustainable way of being.”
Over the next five years, the Project is striving toward restoring 20,000 hectares of forest in North Sumatra, Indonesia (double the size of Paris), protecting the habitats of six endangered species in the region (the Sumatran Tiger, Sunda Pangolin,
Sumatran Clouded Leopard, Malayan Tapir, Black Sumatran Langur and Sambar Deer), improving the livelihoods of the 16,000 people who call this area home, and capturing an estimated 300,000 tons of CO2 from the air and avoiding the release of more than 200,000 tons of CO2e emissions. This commitment is one of the largest protection and restoration efforts for any beauty brand to date, and we hope many more follow on this path.
