Davines Group Launches ‘Rethinking Plastic’ Initiative
MILAN — Davines Group — the Italian beauty company that owns professional hair care and skin care brands Davines and Comfort Zone — has teamed up with social enterprise Plastic Bank on an initiative raising awareness about plastic.
Dubbed “Rethinking Plastic,” the global campaign is aimed at preventing 100 tons of plastic from invading the oceans by the end of the year, while improving the quality of life of local populations involved in collecting the material, which is one of the most frequently deployed in the packaging of beauty products.
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In particular, Plastic Bank builds ethical recycling ecosystems in coastal communities enabling local collectors to exchange their plastic waste for premiums, which help them provide basic family necessities such as groceries, cooking fuel, school tuition and health insurance. Then, the collected material is recycled to be reintegrated into products and packaging as part of a closed-loop supply chain.
Through a blockchain platform, Plastic Bank secures the transaction and provides real-time data visualization, ensuring transparency and traceability throughout the process.
Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines are the areas involved in the project supported by Davines Group, since these countries present high pollution and poverty rates due to the lack of waste treatment infrastructure and the dependency on disposable packaging.
“It has become obvious that the only way to accelerate the needed transformation from the current socio-economic extractive model toward a new regenerative paradigm — a transformation that can no longer be postponed — is that of creating multilateral alliances and coalitions working together to reach that objective,” said Davines Group’s chairman Davide Bollati, who defined the partnership with Plastic Bank “a new step forward in our ongoing path of sustainability and regeneration.”
Courtesy of Davines Group and Plastic Bank
Since getting the B Corp certification in 2016, the Davines Group — which generated 153 million euros sales last year — has strengthened its commitment in rethinking actions in favor of a regenerative approach.
For one, it focused on increasingly developing packaging based on eco-design principles, producing lighter solutions from recycled materials or renewable sources from a single material, which are easier to dispose of and recycle. In doing so, it estimated to have saved more than 640 tons of plastic from 2014 to 2020.
Overall, last year, as in the two previous years, the company succeeded in sending zero production waste to disposal sites, recovering 86.3 percent of the total through recycling or energy conversion. In particular, 59 percent of all of plastic packaging came from renewable sources or was recycled.
Running through the end of the year, the Rethinking Plastic campaign is not the first environmental initiative promoted by the group. As reported, for Earth Day earlier this year, the company launched a collective challenge through the AWorld app with the goal to save 80 tons of CO2 in three months.
Over the summer, it also teamed with the Rodale Institute nonprofit specialized in regenerative organic agriculture, expanding its headquarters in Parma, Italy, to include a regenerative organic farm, research center and education hub aimed at supporting local farmers as well as exploring ways in which agricultural practices can influence the supply chain of personal care products while simultaneously helping to mitigate climate change.
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