For Croda’s 100-year milestone, we’ve gathered thoughts from our heads of R&D and Strategy on which key trends across the chemical ingredient supplier industry are poised to influence the next 25 years of beauty ingredients.
We’ve collected our findings in the report “Navigating the future of innovative ingredients: Trends shaping the next 25 years” and provided some highlights below.
Sustainability
The 2024 World Economic Forum Global Risk Report lists its top four risks to the chemical ingredient supplier industry as:
- Natural resource shortages.
- Biodiversity loss.
- Critical changes to earth systems.
- Extreme weather events due to climate change.
The next 25 years of Consumer Care
Andy Butterworth – Vice President R&D – discusses the next 25 years of trends in the beauty industry
Andy Butterworth – Vice President Research & Development Croda Consumer Care – discusses the next 25 years of innovative ingredients in the beauty industry.
All four of these risks relate to environmental stress and indicate the importance of environmental sustainability in our industry.
Key sustainability considerations in the beauty industry include:
Impact on resources
Unsustainable extraction practices for raw materials will lead to resource shortages, habitat loss, and decreases in biodiversity. It is therefore imperative that businesses transition to become Nature Positive, meaning that they are actively preserving and restoring species, ecosystems, and natural processes. Sources: What is Nature Positive? or Nature Positive | Croda
The shift from virgin petrochemical feedstocks to bio-based, recycled and waste materials will also gain momentum, with the proportion of virgin petrochemicals used in the cosmetics ingredients industry expected to decline significantly over the next 25 years. However, as populations grow and the competition for biomass between food and these ingredients intensifies, bio-based materials that are perceived to be competing with food for arable land will come under increased scrutiny. Carbon is the building block upon which our industry is built, and the challenge will be to find truly sustainable carbon sources as alternatives to both virgin petrochemicals and prime crop-based biomass. Various new carbon sources are being explored across the industry such as waste gas capture technologies as well as plant derived lignin as raw materials.
Owning net-zero
The 2030 decarbonisation net-zero targets to which governments around the world subscribed in the late 2010s and early 2020s are predicted to be missed by most. As a result, national governments are expected to pass the pressure down to corporations who will be required to step up and provide solutions. This is likely to come in the form of industry targets and regulation – such as those already in place in the automotive sector for electric and hybrid vehicles – and through extra taxation on products that undermine a country’s ability to meet national environmental commitments – such as the levy on plastic bags in UK shops.
We can expect that by 2050 these measures will have moved from packaging for consumer products to the raw materials from which they are made. Legislation and regulation in this area could become far more complex and give speciality ingredients companies more work to do to ensure compliance and remain competitive. Yet it also offers a significant opportunity for those companies with sustainability already at the centre of their strategy. Businesses that are seeking sustainable ways to increase the purity, performance, and provenance of their products, and those with the expertise to evidence their environmental impact from cradle to grave, are likely to navigate the instability most effectively.
This is why our industry is looking closely at adopting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a standard decision-making tool. This is a significant change – unlike current measures for sustainability claims, LCA can look at the environmental impact of a product from ‘cradle to grave’ and involves a far more thorough analytical review from development to sourcing and disposal. It means claims of sustainability will move beyond only reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to a more rounded assessment of the value chain, where questions about carbon sources, biodegradability, and product end-of-life will be front of mind.
Croda Beauty has carried out an array of both cradle-to-gate and cradle-to-grave LCAs, evaluating 16 key indicators including climate change, land use, water use, human toxicity, and eutrophication. This comprehensive approach gives brands the insights they need to understand any potential burden shifts, enabling them to best meet business needs.
Consumer choice
We already see that a significant proportion of consumers want to buy more sustainable products from companies that are behaving responsibly and are providing solutions to climate change. Furthermore, consumers are already choosing products that meet the effects of climate change, such as skin care that combats the effects of air pollution.
We discuss this extensively elsewhere, particularly in our Climate Adaptive Beauty trend page.
Find out more about Croda´s sustainability commitments and achievements.
Our Impact
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is already disrupting traditional ingredient manufacturing processes. That is expected to continue over the next 25 years as we see increasing emphasis on biotech solutions across 3 main categories: plant cell cultures, fermentation and marine biotechnology.
Croda Beauty is well placed to meet this trend, as we have more than 30 years of experience in the field and almost one-third of our cosmetic active ingredients are derived from biotechnology.
Plant cell culture
Croda Beauty is proud of our world- leading position in plant cell culture, in part because we know how crucial they will be to the next 25 years of the beauty industry. Plant cell culture offers the ability to protect biodiversity and natural ecosystems through limiting the quantity of raw plant material required, ultimately reducing the need for traditional cultivation methods and arable land use.
Plant cell culture also boosts innovation by enabling the production of specific compounds at very high levels of purity for advanced applications.
Examples of Croda Beauty ingredients manufactured using plant cell culture include Mel[o]stem and Majestem.
Fermentation
Fermentation represents a way to produce speciality ingredients using renewable, biologically-derived resources and thereby reducing resource consumption. As a potential alternative to petrochemicals and fossil fuels, fermentation can support the transition towards a circular economy by using renewable, biological feedstocks and even waste materials.
Examples of Croda Beauty ingredients manufactured using fermentation include NatraFusion™ SL HA and KeraBio™ K31 which both use targeted microorganisms to generate stocks of active ingredients that conventionally would be obtained from petrochemical or animal sources respectively.
Marine biotechnology
With more than 80% of marine organisms still unexplored, the opportunity to discover novel compounds that could revolutionise product development across multiple industries is vast. Marine micro-organisms, such as those living in extreme environments, like volcanic vents, could offer unique and efficacious compounds for future product innovation. One example is Luceane™, obtained by biofermentation of Pseudoalteromonas strain.
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Source: Croda, website Trends shaping the next 25 years of beauty ingredients
