Coty Partners With Green Tech Firm to Make Sustainable Perfume

(Bloomberg) -- Cosmetics maker Coty Inc. is teaming with an environmental technology firm to produce fragrances using a sustainable version of its key ingredient in a bid to make them more appealing to eco-friendly consumers.

The approach will give New York-based Coty its supply of ethanol -- used in perfume to disperse scent -- without using traditional methods extracting it from agricultural products like sugar cane that rely on extensive use of land, water and fertilizer. Its new partner, LanzaTech Inc., instead makes ethanol from recaptured industrial emissions such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

As younger consumers increase their purchasing power and beauty products take center-stage in their spending, Coty plans to use the clean form of ethanol in a majority of its fragrance brands by 2023, Chief Executive Officer Sue Nabi said in an interview.

“The consumers of today and tomorrow are Gen Z, and they are absolutely not able to compromise anymore on anything that's not sustainable,” she said.

Instead of making fresh ethanol from fermented sugars, Illinois-based LanzaTech compresses emissions captured from steel mills and refineries, then creates a finished product through its own fermenting process, Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Holmgren said.

“Most people would not think of perfume as something that needs to start using recycled carbon,” Holmgren said in an interview. “We're turning all this waste carbon into a usable product.”

Coty's move to go beyond recyclable packaging and expand into sustainable ingredients is part of its broader sustainability strategy, which includes a pledge to reduce absolute carbon emissions across the supply chain by 30% by 2030.

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