World Environment Day Q&A with Parminder Kaur
Hi Parminder! Thanks for speaking to us as we recognise World Environment Day. To start off with can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
I currently have the privilege of being the Director of Product Integrity for No7 Beauty Company, which includes leading the area of Sustainability. I have worked in WBA for a while, in a host of different roles including healthcare, innovations and global business divisions. Prior to WBA, I worked and lived in the US. Outside of work, my life is pretty much dedicated to my family - I’m mummy to two crazy but beautiful babies. I’m science obsessed, I studied BioMed which looks at the impact of health & medicine on the body, then further studies into nutrition & medicine so I’m into natural remedies and how to cure, heal through plants & foods.
So, you’re on the front line when it comes to how we innovate to improve our sustainability credentials across our brands! How important do you think it is for us to develop more sustainable business practices?
If you look at the rate of global climate change, other environmental issues such as deforestation or lack of natural resource availability coupled with social topics such as human rights, poverty and health. It’s not just important for us to develop more sustainable business practices but essential. We also know that having a great product or brand in some cases is not enough anymore and customers are shifting loyalty to brands who contribute to society and the planet, in a purposeful way. Which gives us another reason to prioritise this topic.
What would you say are some of the biggest improvements we’ve made in the last 18 months?
I think we have really challenged ourselves in this space over the last 18 months, from supporting Boots to rollout the ‘Recycle at Boots’ scheme from 50 to 700 stores UK wide, to eliminating over 400 tons of single-use plastic gift packaging from Boots and No7 Beauty Company brand gifting ranges for Christmas 2020. At a brand level, Soap & Glory joined Botanics and Liz Earle to become Leaping Bunny approved, Liz Earle achieved CarbonNeutral® status and No7 recently relaunched its cosmetics line to be made with increased recycled materials and to be 100 percent recyclable, removing 20 tons of steel weight from its lipstick caps in the process. While we have always achieved great things, we have been reflecting on how we can be bolder with our purpose and contribution in sustainability. As a result, we have big, bold 2030- sustainability targets which really link back to our purpose and values as No7BC and set us apart from our competitors - (we all love a little bit of healthy competition!)
And is there anything exciting in the pipeline you can tell us about?
So much……it’s going to be great to start talking externally and internally with our teams about our 2030 targets, and what role we can all play in reducing our environmental footprint and increasing our social purpose. Our brands are launching some big partnerships which will be all about helping us give back to the planet and society. We’re partnering closely with the Research team to start to identify new, unique innovation approaches to product sustainability, and hopefully start to identify some first to market opportunities. Last but not least, we have an industry renewed expert joining the team in August to lead this exciting agenda.
Amazing, and finally a couple of questions in honor of World Environment Day:
What’s something you do at home to be more sustainable?
I’m obsessed (and super strict) about recycling and how we manage waste as a family, I could tell you from memory most of what in my kitchen bin can be recycled and how I think recycling is a great way to easily contribute to waste reduction.
And, because we also like to end on a light hearted note, if you were an animal, what would you be?
Tough questions ( I would have said a Panda then couldn’t answer the why because unfortunately I don’t just sleep, eat & repeat) – so I asked my daughter and her response is below:
You would be a tigeress or a lioness because you're beautiful, strong, hardworking and you protect your children :)