Now that we have entered the latter half of 2025, at this point when the earnings reports of major companies are wrapping up, there is a report that must be examined as importantly as the earnings — the "sustainability management report," which checks a company's ESG moves. Because a sustainability management report lets one confirm a company's goals, moves, and outlook for ESG management, it plays the role of an important evaluation indicator, all the more as corporate environmental and social responsibility comes to the fore. Today, we review the "2024 Amorepacific Holdings Sustainability Report" of "Amorepacific," the leading player in Korea's beauty industry.
2030 A MORE Beautiful Promise
[Cover of the 2024 Amorepacific Holdings Sustainability Report © Amorepacific]
The influence of K-beauty is formidable. According to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, Korea's cosmetics exports in the first half amounted to 5.5 billion dollars (about 7.6026 trillion won), a record high. Actively entering not only the traditional export market of China but also the Middle East and South America, it proved that K-beauty's achievements are not a temporary phenomenon appearing only in a particular region. At the center of such K-beauty, how is Amorepacific (hereafter "Amore"), active under the calling of "making people beautiful, making the world beautiful," striving to make the world beautiful?
Amore is executing a strategy of fulfilling five promises based on the two axes of "walking together with customers and society" and "coexistence with great nature." Specifically, to contribute to realizing customers' sustainable lifestyles, it reduces the carbon footprint of all new products through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and actively uses renewable energy. It reduces the environmental impact of cosmetics packaging by improving the materials of plastic packaging, and to minimize the environmental impact of the palm-oil cultivation process — palm oil being used as a raw material across beauty products — it is also making the effort to fully use palm oil certified by the "Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)." Beyond this, spreading the values of diversity and inclusion, Amore pursues sustainability toward the environment and society as a whole.
Sustainability in the Cosmetics Development and Manufacturing Process
The product Life Cycle Assessment that Amore established comprehensively analyzes the environmental impacts arising throughout a product's entire process — raw-material extraction, production, distribution, use, and disposal. This assessment consists of 16 categories containing factors that can affect the environment and humans, such as fossil fuels, water use, acidification, toxic components, and fine-dust formation. Therefore, the Life Cycle Assessment can be used as an objective indicator to refer to when developing new products, as a standard by which consumers purchase products, and through this it can also draw out positive change across the industry.
[Dongbuk-Bukchon Wind Farm © Renewable Energy Guide]
In addition, in 2024, Amore achieved RE100 by converting 100% of the electricity used at its four major production sites and logistics centers nationwide to renewable energy. Amore sought the renewable-energy transition by directly building solar-power systems on idle land at its sites and logistics centers, and mobilizing various methods such as direct and third-party Power Purchase Agreements (PPA), Virtual Power Purchase Agreements (VPPA), the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates (REC), and green tariff plans. Among these, the VPPA is a power-purchase-agreement format that Amore concluded for the first time in Korea. With this, Amore became a company that applied the maximum methodologies for securing renewable energy available in Korea.
The Company's Efforts for Value Consumption
Amore conducts a materiality assessment to identify, among the ESG matters related to its business, those that must be dealt with first. The materiality matter ranked first in the 2024 report is the environmental impact of packaging. This is based on the judgment that, through packaging improvement, it can reduce carbon emissions and improve the recycling rate, giving a real positive impact to the environment. Considering that most cosmetics use plastic packaging, building a plastic-circulation model based on the 4R strategy — reducing plastic packaging use (Reduce), raising recyclability (Recycle), creating an environment for reuse (Reuse), and directly recovering containers (Return) — will hold great meaning.
In fact, Amore reduced plastic use by 1,696 tons over the single year of 2024 through the expanded application of recycled plastic and the lightening of packaging. It also succeeded in cutting about 4.2 tons of plastic use by improving cap designs and removing unnecessary spatula specifications. Amore plans to reduce plastic use by continuously applying such improvements.
[Cosmetics that adopted refill capsules © Amorepacific]
There are also cases of making recycling easy by not mixing materials other than plastic into cosmetics packaging. It improved product specifications so that containers could be recycled without a complex process — by removing the steel spring inside a pump, or replacing the cap material from steel with the same plastic material as the container. Alternatively, by selling refill containers separately and encouraging repeated use of the case, it reduced plastic use by 81% compared with buying a new product, and by directly intervening in resource circulation through an empty-bottle collection campaign, it collected a cumulative 2,721 tons of empty bottles.
Such a resource-circulation model holds significance in that it enables value consumption — that simply buying Amore's products adds to ESG. What Amore protects is, beyond simply the Earth and the environment, the sustainability of K-beauty, which has become a culture in itself. If you are curious what the beautiful world Amore envisions looks like, how about confirming it through the sustainability report?
by Editor L