Abstract
Research Question: How does L’Oréal create and communicate its environmental sustainability in public reports?
Motivation: Sustainability in the cosmetics industry has been widely examined from technical perspectives, including ingredients, green chemistry, raw materials and life-cycle impacts, there is not much attention that has been given to how companies publicly frame environmental responsibility and translate these concerns into corporate strategy and reporting.
Idea: This study examines the evolution of L’Oréal’s environmental sustainability discourse and its relationship with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), focusing on SDGs 12, 13, 14 and 15. The analysis considers whether changes in sustainability communication reflect a shift from explicit SDG-oriented objectives towards a reporting focused on governance and risks.
Data: The study analyzes L’Oréal’s annual reports, Universal Registration Documents, and due diligence for 2020–2024, complemented by financial and sustainability indicators from the LSEG Refinitiv Eikon database, including revenue, gross margin, environmental pillar scores and SDG reporting status.
Tools: A mixed-methods approach was used, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative text mining. Using R Studio and the TidyText package, word frequencies, bigrams and trigrams were analyzed after extracting environment-related disclosures. Excel was used to examine financial and environmental performance trends.
Findings: The results show a gradual transformation of L’Oréal’s environmental discourse from relatively broad environmental and product-oriented themes towards organizational responsibility, risk management, performance evaluation, supply-chain governance and executive oversight. Suppliers become particularly prominent in 2024, indicating an increasing value-chain perspective. At the same time, explicit SDG references decline; environmental themes are directly linked to SDGs in 2020–2021, mentioned without explicit links in 2022–2023, and no SDG specification is identified in 2024. This does not indicate the disappearance of environmental responsibility, but rather a change in how it is framed and communicated.
Contribution: The study contributes to sustainability reporting research by providing a longitudinal company-level analysis of how environmental responsibility is constructed through corporate discourse. It connects text-mining evidence with the evolution of SDG visibility and the governance-oriented logic of contemporary sustainability reporting, offering insights for understanding corporate accountability, transparency and communication of environmental responsibility in the cosmetics industry.