The New Zealand-based skincare brand Emma Lewisham has huge news today—it’s now officially carbon positive! Emma Lewisham, the woman behind the eponymous brand, has announced that her label is the world’s first carbon positive beauty brand.

The term, sometimes referred to as carbon negative or climate positive, means the brand actually reduces (or offsets) more emissions than they create. It’s a step further than carbon neutral and it basically means the Emma Lewisham brand benefits the environment by simply existing (okay, our words, not theirs…). It’s an incredible feat, considering the beauty brand is only 19 months old. And that’s not all—the brand can now officially say it’s also 100% circular. 

“We’re proud to have set a new benchmark in beauty as the world’s first carbon positive and 100% circular designed beauty brand,” Emma Lewisham said. “If the whole beauty industry did this we’d reduce our global carbon emissions by 70%. It has to happen now.”

And because, as we know, the best and most influential visionaries lift up those around them too—today, Emma Lewisham will also publicly release its IP for its 100% circular designed product packaging and carbon positive model. What does that mean? It means other beauty brands can essentially copy Emma Lewisham, in order to make changes in their own businesses that will benefit our earth.

“The reason we’re giving our IP away is to create a new norm, the more that other beauty brands are doing this, the more we can actually bring about behavioural change,” explained Lewisham. “People do want to do the right thing and I think if we make it as easy as possible for them, we are seeing in the metrics that they are engaging with this.” 

Emma Lewisham is calling on its competitors—like La Mer, Dior, and L’Oreal—to join them in creating a “truly beautiful beauty industry”. By sharing the IP and a blueprint for how they did it, Lewisham added brands can also “reach out to us with what problems they’re having, challenges and what information they would like, and we have populated the information for them.”

The beauty industry currently produces 120 billion units of waste every year, and, like we explained in the June issue of Gritty Pretty, that’s partly because it’s incredibly difficult to properly recycle your #empties.

“The challenge is, because of how beauty packaging is made, the complexity with what it’s made of,” explained Lewisham, adding that a standard pump can have 12 or 13 different pieces in it—“while anything can be recycled [in theory], we know it’s not being properly recycled.”

Lewisham has worked closely with world-leading environmental certification agency, Toitu Envirocare, both to independently evaluate the brand’s carbon emissions, but also to help perfect its circular beauty model. As a circular beauty brand, Emma Lewisham has a refillable model—meaning each Emma Lewisham product can be refilled, reused or recycled (ie. put back in circulation). 

“For our Australian and New Zealand customers, they can buy Emma Lewisham products from our website or our retailers and when they return to buy the product again, they don’t have to buy the full-size product, they can buy a pod or a pouch to refill it. It saves up to 74% in carbon emissions.” 

Customers can also choose to add a returnable shipping pouch at the point of purchase, to return any empty packaging, which the Emma Lewisham brand resuses. “It’s our responsibility to make it super easy for them. They can then add the product into the box, and it comes back to our facility in New Zealand. The small amount that can’t be reused goes to a recycling plant. All retailers are set up as drop off points too and from next month David Jones will have a dedicated Emma Lewisham drop off point.”

Emma Lewisham’s research has shown that a carbon positive business model is “the only viable solution to the beauty industry meeting global climate targets” and her blueprint has already had written endorsement from iconic environmentalist, ethologist and United Nations Messenger of Peace, Dr Jane Goodall. 

“New Zealand beauty brand, Emma Lewisham, is demonstrating what it means to be a truly sustainable business. Through their carbon positive and circular business model, Emma Lewisham is creating environmental prosperity and showing their peers that this business model is not just possible but paramount if we are to make a meaningful difference,” said Dr Jane Goodall. 

Lewisham said Goodall was the first person she wrote to with her findings. “She has been someone that has been a common thread throughout my life, I always seemed to pick her to talk about school speeches… She’s been an icon in my mind and when we finished all of the work we were doing here, we talked about writing to Jane and sharing the information. It feels really rewarding for me and my team to have someone of her credentials validate the work that we’re doing.”

When asked about the greatest challenge of creating her business model, Lewisham shared: “One of the biggest challenges was having supply chain transparency—so understanding where, for example, all of our ingredients come from, which sounds really simple in practice but a lot of suppliers don’t want to disclose that information. It was very, very challenging to get that information, but now we can proudly say that we know where every ingredient comes from.”

And the biggest reward? “Achieving something people said was impossible.”

You can read more about Emma Lewisham’s incredible achievement here, including information and resources about the brand’s blueprint and IP, as well a how to get in touch with the Emma Lewisham team.