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The Best and Worst Beauty Brands We Rated in 2024

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22 Dec, 2024

This post was originally published on Good on You

In 2024, Good On You launched into rating beauty brands. Based on our initial batch of 239 brand ratings—which we first revealed in the Beauty Sustainability Scorecard—today we’re zooming in on the brands that landed at the top and the bottom of the curve. 

Introducing beauty brand ratings

In October, Good On You announced our expansion into rating beauty brands after spending years building the most trusted sustainability brand rating methodology in fashion. We took considerable time to ensure the methodology for this new vertical reflected the nuanced issues in the beauty supply chain. Our expert rating team spent more than a year developing the new methodology and rating the first batch of 239 beauty brands—along the way, consulting industry leaders, assessing the most significant challenges, and outlining best practice across the key pillars of people, the planet, and animals.

As we’ve done in fashion for nearly a decade, we’re only rating beauty brands based on publicly available information about brands to ensure they can be held accountable by everyone—this includes standards and certifications, third-party indices and public reporting, as well as brands’ own disclosures. Transparency is key to securing a more sustainable future, and we’ll never take information into account that brands won’t publish for everyone to see.

What we see are a few small brands ahead of the curve, with more circular and innovative business models. However, large brands tend to lag behind.

We marked the launch by publishing the first 239 brand ratings and our deepest data report to date, the Beauty Sustainability Scorecard, which earned press everywhere from the Financial Times to Vogue Business. The Scorecard included industry-wide performance insights on more than a dozen key issues. We also revealed the best and worst performing brands, both large and small.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at the brands that scored highest and lowest in our first annual beauty list. Note that this list focuses on the beauty sector, where we’re rapidly expanding our coverage with more beauty ratings to come in the new year. As we wrote in the Scorecard: “To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean these top rated brands are the most sustainable out there—they’re simply the top performing based on the brands we’ve reviewed so far. What we see are a few small brands ahead of the curve, with more circular and innovative business models. However, large brands tend to lag behind, and even for the smaller number of top rated large brands, they’re still not doing enough to tackle problems such as packaging waste through, say, circular economy principles, which are a couple of the 42 key issues Good On You rates in beauty.”

The role of Good On You’s ratings

A growing number of shoppers are better than ever at seeing through shallow and untrue sustainability claims made by companies in many consumer industries and are using their voices to demand positive change. Their journey often begins with checking a brand’s Good On You rating to get a sense of how the brand performs across its supply chain, not only for a few product-level claims. In the last few years, we’ve observed a growing demand not just for fashion brand ratings, but beauty brands too, and that’s why we branched out—it’s the natural next step in helping you make more informed choices about the products you buy.

Just like our fashion brand ratings, when Good On You’s analysts complete a beauty brand rating, they give the brand a score out of 100, which is an unweighted view of how a brand performs across the three key rating pillars (people, planet, and animals). They’re assessed based only on publicly available information to promote transparency across the beauty industry. We then group brands into a five-point rating scale to help you more easily identify who “We Avoid” (1/5) and who is “Good” (4/5) and “Great” (5/5).

Unfortunately, the full rating distribution in the beauty industry is not looking great: with the complexities of product packaging, ingredient transparency, chemical use, microplastic management, and so much more, the majority—53%—of the 239 brands we rated scored “Not Good Enough”. And just two received our “Great” rating. They’re both small brands, and that echoes something we often see in the fashion industry—large brands, the ones with the most power and influence, aren’t doing enough to improve their sustainability.

Ratings for over 230 beauty brands are now live on the directory and in the app, so it’s easier than ever to compare brands’ impacts on the issues that matter most. But if you’re wondering which brands stand out on both ends of the rating scale, read on to discover the lowest and the highest achievers based on our world-leading methodology.

The large beauty brands ‘We Avoid’

We proportionately apply more demanding standards to large brands as they inherently have greater impacts and influence, but even so, the vast majority of large brands rate poorly, and these are the 10 worst that we’ve rated so far.

Seven of them received exactly zero points—the lowest possible score—for their sustainability efforts. That means they aren’t being transparent and are disclosing little to no information about their practices.

‘Good’ and ‘Great’ beauty brands

It’s important to call out brands doing poorly, but ultimately, our mission is to support the development of a more sustainable world by championing the brands that are working to do better, and that’s why we’re noting 10 of the highest rated brands here. We’ve split them out into lists of small and large brands, acknowledging that businesses of different sizes have disproportionate power to effect change in their direct operations and the wider supply chain.

As we mentioned above, it’s important to note this doesn’t necessarily mean these top-rated brands are the most sustainable out there—they’re simply the top-performing based on the brands we’ve reviewed so far. And we’ll keep the ratings coming in 2025.

The post The Best and Worst Beauty Brands We Rated in 2024 appeared first on Good On You.

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Taking the electronic pulse of the circular economy

Taking the electronic pulse of the circular economy

In June, I had the privilege of attending the 2025 E-Waste World, Battery Recycling, Metal Recycling, and ITAD & Circular Electronics Conference & Expo events in Frankfurt, Germany.

Speaking in the ITAD & Circular Electronics track on a panel with global Circular Economy leaders from Foxway Group, ERI and HP, we explored the evolving role of IT asset disposition (ITAD) and opportunities in the circular electronics economy.

The event’s focus on advancing circular economy goals and reducing environmental impact delivered a series of insights and learnings. From this assembly of international expertise across 75+ countries, here are some points from the presentations that stood out for me:

1. Environmental impact of the digital economy

Digitalisation has a heavy material footprint in the production phase, and lifecycle thinking needs to guide every product decision. Consider that 81% of the energy a laptop uses in its lifetime is consumed during manufacture (1 tonne in manufacture is equal to 10,000 tonnes of CO2) and laptops are typically refreshed or replaced by companies every 3–4 years.

From 2018 to 2023, the average number of devices and connections per capita in the world increased by 50% (2.4 to 3.6). In North America (8.2 to 13.4) and Western Europe (5.6 to 9.4), this almost doubled. In 1960, only 10 periodic table elements were used to make phones. In 1990, 27 elements were used and now over 60 elements are used to build the smartphones that we have become so reliant on.

A key challenge is that low-carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same minerals. Material resource extraction could increase 60% between 2020 and 2060, while demand for lithium, cobalt and graphite is expected to rise by 500% until 2050.

High growth in ICT demand and Internet requires more attention to the environmental footprint of the digital economy. Energy consumption of data centres is expected to more than double by 2026. The electronics industry accounts for over 4% of global GHG — and digitalisation-related waste is growing, with skewed impacts on developing countries.

E-waste is rising five times faster than recycling — 1 tonne of e-waste has a carbon footprint of 2 tonnes. Today’s solution? ‘Bury it or burn it.’ In terms of spent emissions, waste and the costs associated with end-of-life liabilities, PCBAs (printed circuit board assembly) cost us enormously — they generally achieve 3–5% recyclability (75% of CO2 in PCBAs is from components).

2. Regulating circularity in electronics

There is good momentum across jurisdictions in right-to-repair, design and labelling regulations; recycling targets; and voluntary frameworks on circularity and eco-design.

The EU is at the forefront. EU legislation is lifting the ICT aftermarket, providing new opportunities for IT asset disposition (ITAD) businesses. To get a sense, the global market for electronics recycling is estimated to grow from $37 billion to $108 billion (2022–2030). The value of refurbished electronics is estimated to increase from $85.9 billion to $262.2 billion (2022–2032). Strikingly, 40% of companies do not have a formal ITAD strategy in place.

Significantly, the EU is rethinking its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) management targets, aligned with upcoming circularity and WEEE legislation, as part of efforts to foster the circular economy. A more robust and realistic circularity-driven approach to setting collection targets would better reflect various factors including long lifespans of electronic products and market fluctuations.

Australia and New Zealand lag the EU’s comprehensive e-waste mandated frameworks. The lack of a systematic approach results in environmental degradation and missed positioning opportunities for businesses in the circular economy. While Australia’s Senate inquiry into waste reduction and recycling recommended legislating a full circular economy framework — including for imported and local product design, financial incentives and regulatory enforcement, New Zealand remains the only OECD country without a national scheme to manage e-waste.

3. Extending product lifecycles

Along with data security and digital tools, reuse was a key theme in the ITAD & Circular Electronics track of the conference. The sustainable tech company that I lead, Greenbox, recognises that reuse is the simplest circular strategy. Devices that are still functional undergo refurbishment and are reintroduced into the market, reducing new production need and conserving valuable resources.

Conference presenters highlighted how repair over replacement is being legislated as a right in jurisdictions around the world. Resources are saved, costs are lowered, product life is extended, and people and organisations are empowered to support a greener future. It was pointed out that just 43% of countries have recycling policies, 17% of global waste is formally recycled, and less than 1% of global e-waste is formally repaired and reused.

Right to repair is a rising wave in the circular economy, and legislation is one way that civil society is pushing back on programmed obsolescence. Its global momentum continues at different speeds for different product categories — from the recent EU mandates to multiple US state bills (and some laws) through to repair and reuse steps in India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Commission has done a scoping study to identify product groups under the Ecodesign framework that would be most relevant for implementing an EU-wide product reparability scoring system.

Attending this event with the entire electronic waste recycling supply chain — from peers and partners to suppliers and customers — underscored the importance of sharing best practices to address the environmental challenges that increased hardware proliferation and complex related issues are having on the world.

Ross Thompson is Group CEO of sustainability, data management and technology asset lifecycle management market leader Greenbox. With facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Greenbox Group provides customers all over the world a carbon-neutral supply chain for IT equipment to reduce their carbon footprint by actively managing their environmental, social and governance obligations.

Image credit: iStock.com/Mustafa Ovec

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