How much waste does L'Oréal produce? Around 165,000 metric tonnes (364 million pounds) is expected in 2026 from the sites they operate, meaning their factories, distribution centres, laboratories and offices.
That is only what they throw out themselves. The packaging that left with their products came to 296,158 tonnes in 2025, nearly twice as much again, and it becomes waste at somebody else's bathroom bin.
L'Oréal say they are working towards recovering all of their waste through reuse and recycling. In 2025 the share that actually came back as material fell from 69% to 66%, while the total headed from 155,655 tonnes towards 165,000 in 2026.
L'Oréal's annual waste totals (2024-2026)
L'Oréal only began publishing one group-wide waste tonnage in 2024, when the EU's new sustainability reporting rules took effect, so the run below is short and two of its three years are their own reported figures.
| Year | Total waste (tonnes) | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 165,000 | +9,345 |
| 2025 | 155,655 | -9,283 |
| 2024 | 164,938 | baseline |
Note: 2024 and 2025 are L'Oréal's own reported totals. The 2026 line holds 2025's waste per euro of sales steady and applies the group's own first-half 2026 sales growth of 5.8%, which gives about 165,000 tonnes.
The 2025 fall was real but narrow. Non-hazardous waste dropped 10,772 tonnes, while hazardous waste went the other way and rose 1,490 tonnes to 24,863.
Whether 2026 lands where the table says depends on one assumption holding. If waste per euro of sales keeps improving at the rate it did in 2025, the figure comes in nearer 153,000 tonnes instead.
There is a reason to be careful with that. L'Oréal's own reporting note leaves three recently bought brands, Dr G, Color Wow and Medik8, out of the 2025 waste count, and those sites have to enter the numbers eventually.
Most of the tonnage comes off sites like this one.
Who are L'Oréal
L'Oréal are the largest beauty company in the world. Eugène Schueller, a young chemist, founded them in 1909 to sell a hair dye he had mixed himself, and the head office is still just outside Paris, in Clichy.
Today the group sells shampoo, lipstick, face cream and perfume under names including L'Oréal Paris, Garnier, Maybelline, Lancôme, Kiehl's and La Roche-Posay.
Five numbers give the scale of the operation.
- 44.05 billion euros of sales in 2025, up 4.0% like for like and 1.3% as reported.
- More than 95,000 employees worldwide.
- Skincare is the biggest category at 37% of sales, ahead of makeup at 19%, haircare at 18% and fragrances at 15%.
- Europe is the biggest region at 34% of sales, ahead of North America at 27% and North Asia at 23%.
- More than 30% of sales are online, which puts a delivery box around a product that already carries packaging of its own.
None of that looks like heavy industry. L'Oréal's waste does not come from a few enormous objects. It comes from a very large number of very small ones.
What drives the waste at a beauty company
Four things push the tonnage up, and only one of them happens on a production line.
- The sheer number of units. L'Oréal no longer publish a product count, but their 2023 report gives two figures their auditors signed off on that fit together only one way. 93,496 tonnes of waste at 13.7 grams per finished product works out at roughly 6.8 billion products in a single year.
- A beauty pack is several materials pretending to be one. L'Oréal describe the problem in their own reporting, where they say they are gradually removing the things that interfere with recycling, naming opaque materials and metal components inside plastic.
- Formula outweighs packaging four to one. In 2025 the group handled 1,266,967 tonnes of formula against 296,158 tonnes of packaging. Mixing and filling that much liquid means tanks washed between batches, and the waste that comes off a production site includes the sludge left after treating the water.
- Destroyed stock counts, wherever it is destroyed. L'Oréal's reporting note says the figure includes all of their goods destroyed by suppliers, subcontractors or third-party warehouses at a site's request and expense. Unsellable stock is theirs even when somebody else burns it.
The packaging L'Oréal puts on the market
This is the number that decides what L'Oréal owe under producer responsibility rules, and it is the bigger of the two. Here is what the group handled in 2025.
| What L'Oréal handled | Tonnes |
|---|---|
| Packaging on the market | 296,158 |
| Formula inside it | 1,266,967 |
| Recycled components | 98,825 |
Note: L'Oréal's own figures, against 306,477 tonnes of packaging, 1,203,544 tonnes of formula and 78,375 tonnes of recycled components the year before. Packaging here covers the layer that touches the product and the box that groups products together, weighed as it goes onto the market.
Packaging fell 3.4% in 2025 while the formula inside it grew 5.3%. Lighter packs around more product is exactly what a packaging intensity target is supposed to produce.
The recycled share moved fastest of all. Recycled components went from 26% of packaging materials in 2024 to 33% in 2025, an extra 20,450 tonnes that did not have to be made from new resource.
That share is also the one a regulator will ask about, so it has to be evidenced rather than asserted. Proving recycled content means tracing it back through the supplier, batch by batch.
Why that tonnage is a compliance number
Every tonne of that packaging sits inside a producer responsibility scheme somewhere. L'Oréal register in each country they sell in and pay a fee on the weight and material they put on the market there, starting with France, where the group is based.
Under EU rules those fees are modulated, which means a pack that is easy to recycle costs less than one that is not. The 59% recyclable figure L'Oréal report is therefore a cost line as much as an environmental one.
Cosmetics is one of the harder categories to get right, because one product can arrive as a bottle, a pump and a carton in three different materials, each with its own weight and its own fee under packaging producer responsibility.
Point-of-sale displays add another layer again, and they are packaging too.
Where the 2025 waste ended up
L'Oréal split their waste five ways, and the order of those routes is not arbitrary. The waste hierarchy puts reuse above recycling, recycling above burning, and burning above burial.
| Route | Tonnes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Prepared for reuse | 4,447 | 2.9% |
| Recycling | 98,482 | 63.3% |
| Burned for energy | 46,600 | 29.9% |
| Incinerated without recovery | 5,906 | 3.8% |
| Landfill | 221 | 0.1% |
Note: L'Oréal's own 2025 figures, which sum one tonne above their reported total of 155,655 through rounding in their own table. The first three rows all count as recovered in their reporting, so the 46,600 tonnes burned for energy sits inside that recovery figure.
Burning waste in a plant that captures the heat is called energy recovery, and it does keep material out of the ground. It does not bring the material back. Once a plastic bottle has been burned, it is heat.
Landfill has almost gone. L'Oréal sent 221 tonnes there in 2025, down from 810 the year before, out of more than 155,000. The zero waste to landfill ambition they set in 2017 is close to finished.
Recycling fell while burning rose
The headline total went down in 2025. So did the share of it that came back as material.
Recycling took 11,295 tonnes less than in 2024, a fall of 10.3%. Energy recovery took 4,170 tonnes more, a rise of 9.8%. Roughly a third of what left the recycling stream turned up at the incinerator instead.
L'Oréal publish this as an indicator of their own. What they call non-recycled waste went from 50,462 tonnes in 2024 to 52,726 in 2025, and from 31% of the total to 34%.
How L'Oréal counted their waste before 2024
Anyone comparing this page against an older article will find much smaller numbers, and the reason is the ruler rather than the waste.
| Year | Group waste on the old measure (tonnes) | Returnable packaging in rotation |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 106,024 | 20,435 |
| 2022 | 101,780 | 19,319 |
| 2021 | 99,129 | 19,718 |
Note: L'Oréal's own figures from their 2022 and 2023 annual documents, on the measure they used then, which counted returnable transit packaging as a separate line rather than as waste.
Three things changed with the 2024 report. L'Oréal moved onto the boundary the EU standard sets, brought in stores and small offices by estimate, and began counting goods destroyed on their behalf by suppliers, subcontractors and third-party warehouses.
No single year was measured both ways, so the two runs cannot be joined and this page does not try to join them. The old series is here because it is the only view of the direction of travel before 2024, and that direction was gently upwards.
The targets L'Oréal has set for waste and packaging
Their published commitments now run to 2030, and all three of them are about packaging rather than about the sites.
| Target for 2030 against 2019 | Where 2025 landed |
|---|---|
| Cut virgin plastic in packaging by half | -37% |
| Source half of packaging materials from recycled or biobased | 44% |
| Cut packaging intensity by a fifth | -12% |
Note: L'Oréal's own progress figures for 2025, each measured against a 2019 baseline. Virgin material means resource being used for the first time, with nothing recycled in it.
Six of the eleven years to 2030 have gone, so 55% of the time is used up. Two of these three targets are reductions measured against a 2019 baseline, which makes progress on them easy to check against that clock.
On both of those, L'Oréal have covered more ground than the calendar has. Virgin plastic is 74% of the way to its goal and packaging intensity is 60% of the way to its own.
The third target is an absolute share rather than a reduction, and L'Oréal do not publish the 2019 starting point, so there is no honest way to say how far along it is. What is published is the 44%.
The target that is no longer on the list
What is not there is a target for the waste L'Oréal's own sites produce. Their 2023 commitments table carried one, full recovery of industrial site waste through reuse or recycling by 2030, and the 2025 table does not.
The goal has not vanished from the text. The 2025 report still describes the group as driven by full material recovery from their waste, and still names zero waste to landfill as an ambition. Both now appear without a year attached.
Two dates that passed quietly
The same 2023 list promised that by 2025 all of L'Oréal's plastic packaging would be refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable, and that half of that plastic would be recycled or biobased.
Neither goal appears in the 2025 list, and neither shows as met. The current reporting gives 59% recyclable content and 44% recycled or biobased across all packaging materials, not plastic alone, so there is no longer a published figure that measures those two promises directly.
Frequently asked questions about L'Oréal's waste
Below are the questions that come up most often about L'Oréal's waste, answered from their own published figures.
How much waste does L'Oréal produce each year?
L'Oréal's own sites produced 155,655 tonnes in 2025 and are on track for around 165,000 tonnes in 2026. That is roughly 452 tonnes a day across their factories, warehouses, laboratories and offices.
Does L'Oréal publish a single total waste figure?
Yes, since 2024. Before that they reported a narrower measure that counted fewer sites and treated returnable transit packaging separately, so the older numbers look much smaller without the waste being smaller.
Is L'Oréal's waste actually recycled?
Two thirds of it. In 2025, 98,482 tonnes went to recycling and 4,447 tonnes were prepared for reuse, which is 66% between them. Another 30% was burned for energy, which recovers heat rather than material.
Why did L'Oréal's waste fall in 2025?
Non-hazardous waste dropped 10,772 tonnes while hazardous waste rose 1,490 tonnes. Most of the fall came out of the recycling stream, which took 11,295 tonnes less than it did in 2024.
How much packaging does L'Oréal put on the market?
296,158 tonnes in 2025, down from 306,477 the year before. That is primary and secondary packaging together, weighed as it goes onto the market, and it is nearly twice their own site waste.
Does L'Oréal have a target for their own waste?
Not a dated one any more. Their 2023 commitments table promised full recovery of industrial site waste by 2030. The 2025 table lists three packaging targets and no waste target, though the goal is still described in the text.
Did L'Oréal meet their 2025 packaging goals?
Neither shows as met. The goals were that all plastic packaging would be refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable and that half of it would be recycled or biobased. L'Oréal no longer publish a plastic-only figure.
How do we estimate L'Oréal's waste for 2026?
By holding 2025's waste per euro of sales steady and applying L'Oréal's own first-half 2026 sales growth of 5.8%. If the improvement in that ratio repeats instead, the figure lands nearer 153,000 tonnes.
Images: Pierre5018
