Bérangère Raguenet, director of marketing and communications at Verescence
Eco-design is central to the CSR strategy at Verescence. The company aims to support all needs and all of its clients with a strong vision, creativity, and measurement tools. Bérangère Raguenet, director of marketing and communications at Verescence, sheds light on the subject.
How is eco-design understood at Verescence?
Eco-design is part of our “Glass made to last” CSR strategy, which includes our Eco Solutions: a set of processes and tools we make available to our clients to help them minimize their impact. We want to be proactive when it comes to reducing, reusing, and recycling. To these principles, we have added the concepts of “replacing,” in this case meaning to substitute plastic with glass (glassification), and “disrupting,” to add more value to decoration.
How do you apply eco-design?
In terms of reducing, we worked with the designer De Baschmakoff to make lighter glass that responds to luxury codes. The result is two new 100ml bottles, Moon (106g) and Gem (97g), both with complex, creative forms. As for reusing, there has been a shift in the market towards screw rings (SNI-15) to make re-filling bottles easier. They account for 90 percent of the briefs we receive. So demand is moving towards lighter, more minimalist glass refills, such as L'Oréal’s multi-brand refill. When it comes to recycling, back in 2014 we were among the first to integrate PCR in our bottles, with the development of InfiniteGlass® 40. We expanded our offer in 2021 with InfiniteGlass® 20, which is now our standard, enabling us to dedicate an entire furnace to its production at our Mers-les-Bains site. We are rolling the solution out in Spain, the United States, and, by 2024, South Korea. Today, 80 percent of our production is made with a portion of PCR glass. We also guide our customers towards designs that maximize a bottle’s recyclability at the end of its life using a recyclability scale that we developed for decorated glass with a recycling plant.
Moon
Moon
Gem
GemAnd the other principles?
In terms of glassification, we developed a wonderful project with the serum Advanced Double R Renew & Repair Abeille Royale by Guerlain, which enabled us to push the boundaries of our glass shaping capabilities. Make-up also provides interesting opportunities, especially in mascaras and lipsticks, both formats that our clients challenge us on, as well as in glass caps for perfumes, which are compelling elements for premiumization. In terms of disrupting, we are innovating with single-material solutions that replace metal plates with decorations such as hot stamping or relief printing.
What tool do you consider essential for improvement?
You can’t improve without data. So for each new development—and this has been the case since 2017—we offer our clients a lifecycle assessment to help them chose the best scenario in terms of environmental footprint.
Recently, we created a new tool called the Glass Score: this scoring system allows us to determine if the weight of a glass bottle is optimized, right from the development phase, expressed by a score on a scale from A+ to F. Our clients appreciate the tool for its simplicity and now use it in-house.
