Circular Beauty: Perfume Bottles Get Second Life in French Anti-Waste Pilot

France is leading the charge in transforming the beauty industry's approach to packaging waste through its groundbreaking Anti-Waste Law for a Circular Economy (“AGEC”), which reflects France's commitment to addressing environmental change. 

The AGEC law has introduced several measures to fight and ultimately eliminate waste, and to build a more circular economy, and these can be summarised as falling within the following five main focus areas:

1. eliminating single-use plastics;
2. educating consumers so that they can make better informed decisions;
3. combatting waste and promoting reusability and recyclability initiatives;
4. taking action against planned obsolescence; and
5. improving underlying production methods.

In line with the foregoing, the AGEC law introduces several significant obligations that impact most companies, including ambitious targets (that are calculated and depend on the company’s turnover) in terms of how much reused/recycled packaging companies must use (as opposed to virgin materials). For example, companies reporting an annual turnover exceeding 50 million euros must achieve at least 7% reused packaging by the end of 2025, rising to 10% by 2027. This obligation is reshaping how beauty brands approach packaging.

In an industry where premium presentation has historically taken precedence over sustainability, these targets will require a significant shift from the traditional single-use model that has dominated the beauty sector for decades.

Beauty Industry Embraces Circular Innovation 

Faced with these regulatory targets and deadlines, the French beauty industry is demonstrating remarkable adaptability and innovation. Rather than viewing the AGEC law requirements as a burden, forward-thinking companies are seizing the opportunity to pioneer new approaches that could transform the sector not only within France, but indeed globally. The industry's response has been characterised by collaboration rather than competition, with major brands recognising that systemic change requires collective action. This collaborative spirit is evident in the scale and ambition of the initiatives being launched, which bring together competitors under a shared vision of circularity.

The most significant manifestation of this industry transformation is "La Boucle Beauté Parfums" (The Beauty Perfume Loop), an ambitious experiment that launched on 30th June and runs until 31st October 2025 across 192 outlets throughout France. This initiative represents the first large-scale attempt to implement perfume bottle reuse in the premium beauty sector. Some key information is summarised below:

• The initiative tackles one of the beauty industry's most significant environmental challenges. Glass manufacturing remains one of the most energy-intensive processes in cosmetics and perfume packaging production, making bottle reuse a particularly impactful intervention. Further, perfume bottles are currently predominantly single-use, representing a massive waste of resources and energy. The programme's success will depend on achieving sufficient scale of reusability. 
• The programme brings together an impressive coalition of industry leaders, including major brands such as Parfums Christian Dior (LVMH), Estée Lauder companies, Diptyque, Kenzo Parfums (LVMH), and Rochas (Interparfums) - alongside two key distributors, Nocibé and Beauty Success. This collaboration was initiated by Circul'R with support from ‘We Don't Need Roads’ and the eco-organisation Citéo (responsible for the French packaging sector), demonstrating the multi-stakeholder approach required for systemic change.
• The programme operates on a simple but sophisticated model. Customers can return empty bottles from participating ranges - including J'adore, Flower by Kenzo, Eau de Rochas, and Diptyque products - to designated stores in exchange for a variety of different rewards chosen by each brand. The incentives range from €5 vouchers to 20% discounts on future purchases, making participation attractive to consumers (whilst also educating them on the benefits of circularity). 
• The technical innovation lies in the cleaning process. Collected bottles are transported to specialised centres where they undergo CO2 washing - an innovative process that uses no water, detergents, or solvents. This approach addresses one of the key challenges in packaging reuse: ensuring hygiene and quality standards whilst minimising environmental impact.
• This perfume-focused initiative builds on earlier French experiments with skincare products. As Sixtine Jourde-Roussel, Circul'R's director of coalitions, explains: "It's on the strength of the lessons learned from our first experiment with skincare products that we're now launching this new pilot dedicated to perfume. This progressive approach, by product typology, enables us to build a solid and realistic foundation for reuse in cosmetics".
• The pilot will undergo comprehensive evaluation, including environmental and economic analyses covering water and energy consumption, alongside consumer research to assess market appetite for this new model. This data-driven approach ensures that any future scaling will be based on solid evidence rather than assumptions.

The success of "La Boucle Beauté Parfums" will be measured not just in number of bottles collected or regulatory targets met, but in its ability to prove that circular economy principles can be both environmentally beneficial and commercially viable. As the beauty industry grapples with increasing regulatory pressure and consumer demand for sustainability, the French model offers a compelling vision of how collaboration, innovation, and regulatory alignment can drive meaningful change.

Implications Beyond France: A Model for Global Beauty Regulation

The collaborative model of "La Boucle Beauté Parfums" offers a template for how the beauty industry can proactively address regulatory requirements whilst maintaining commercial efficiencies. By working together on shared infrastructure for collection, cleaning, and redistribution, companies can achieve economies of scale that make circular models both commercially and environmentally successful.

Whilst "La Boucle Beauté Parfums" is specifically designed to meet French AGEC law requirements, its implications and inspiration extend far beyond France's borders. The initiative serves as a proof of concept for circular economy principles that are increasingly relevant across the European Union more broadly, where regulators and governments are implementing similar crackdowns on excessive waste in beauty retail and manufacturing. The European Union's broader circular economy agenda, combined with growing consumer awareness of environmental issues, suggests that the innovations pioneered in France will likely become standard practice across European markets. Further, UK beauty companies, despite Brexit, face similar pressures from both regulatory frameworks and consumer expectations around sustainability.

For the broader beauty sector, the message is clear: the transition to circular packaging models is not a question of if, but when. Those companies that embrace this transition early, learning from pioneers like the participants in "La Boucle Beauté Parfums", will be best positioned to thrive in an increasingly sustainability-focused retail climate.

Authors: Nicola Conway (London), Nour Saab (Paris), Johanna Harelimana (Paris)