Every July, the world makes the same small resolutions. Skip the straw, bring the reusable tote, refuse the bag at the register. We're glad those habits have become more standard, but a month of small refusals can quietly let a much larger fact off the hook…
The beauty and skincare industry produces roughly 120 billion units of packaging every year, most of it plastic, most of it used briefly on a bathroom shelf before beginning a very long afterlife somewhere we'll never see.
We want to be honest about our place in that. Gntl is a company that makes and ships physical products, and every product we make has a footprint. What we can do, and what we've organized the entire company around, is make less of it in the first place, and then take real responsibility for what remains. That's the lens we'd offer this Plastic Free July: not a list of swaps, but a look at how a product gets made, and how much of its impact is decided long before it reaches you.
Designing Products That Replace Instead of Adding
The most consequential sustainability decision we make never appears on a label, because it's the decision not to make something at all.
Most skincare is sold by accumulation. A serum for this, a treatment for that, a new product to solve the problem created by the last one. We build in the opposite direction. Our products are designed to be used for life and to replace several things you'd otherwise own, in formulas gentle enough to work head to toe, for every age and skin type in a household. When a family of four shares two products instead of cycling through twenty, the difference isn't a better bottle, it's twelve bottles that were never manufactured, capped, wrapped, palletized, shipped, or thrown away.
This is the part of sustainability that's hardest to photograph, which is probably why the industry rarely leads with it. A unit that never exists needs no recycling program and no offset, it's simply absent. Designing for that absence is the single biggest lever we have, so it's the one we pull first.
Formulating Without Petroleum, Palm, or the Usual Shortcuts
What goes into the bottle matters as much as how many bottles there are. Our formulas are petroleum-free, built on plant-based alternatives rather than fossil-fuel-derived ingredients, and they're RSPO certified, which means the ingredients we source are forest-safe and free from conventional palm oil, one of the most deforestation-heavy inputs in the category.
We also hold the formulas to standards meant to protect both people and the water these products eventually rinse into. Everything we make meets EU clean standards and is approved against the Credo Dirty List™, which screens out more than 2,700 ingredients of concern. We aren't interested in "clean" as a marketing word. We're interested in the quieter version of it, where what's gentle on sensitive skin also happens to be gentle on what's downstream.
Choosing Packaging With Recyclability Rates in Mind
Good intentions around packaging fall apart at the recycling facility, so we tried to start there rather than end there. We partnered with Better Future Factory, a circular-design consultancy, to pressure-test our packaging decisions instead of guessing at them, and to keep us honest about the gap between what's labeled recyclable and what actually gets recycled. Running a comprehensive lifecycle analysis on each potential packaging solution gave us the confidence to proceed with our final packaging.
In practice, that means our boxes use FSC-certified paperboard from responsibly managed forests, and our packaging is designed to be genuinely recyclable rather than aspirationally so. We won't pretend we've solved packaging; almost no one in this industry has. But we'd rather make fewer, more deliberate choices and explain them plainly than chase a badge.
Being Honest About the Plastic We Still Use
We could quietly leave this part out. We'd rather not, because the brands we trust are the ones that tell you where the edges are.
We still use plastic for our caps and pumps, and it's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. We tested the alternatives. Aluminum caps, for all their appeal on paper, tend to be small and surprisingly heavy, and metal threading against a metal neck can leave an unpleasant residue over time. We're not willing to ship a worse daily experience to win points on a spec sheet, because a product that's frustrating to use is a product that gets abandoned, and an abandoned product is the least sustainable outcome of all. So for now, where a plastic component genuinely makes the ritual better, we use it, and we keep working. We're close with our suppliers on the next generation of materials, and we're always looking for ways to cut plastic without sacrificing the experience.
Our pouch is plastic, too, but the material itself is doing more work than it looks. We partner with an Australian company that developed a carbon-negative plastic film whose feedstock is sugarcane rather than fossil fuel, meaning its production captures more carbon than it emits. And unlike most soft plastics, which are effectively unrecyclable once they leave your hands, this film is recyclable in #4 waste streams. It does need to be specialty recycled rather than tossed in your curbside bin, so it asks a little more of you, but the material is meaningfully less wasteful for both reasons, where it comes from, and where it can go.
Offsetting What's Left With rePurpose Global
Reducing plastic and single-use packaging is the first job. Accounting for the plastic we still use is the second, and we don't think the first excuses skipping the second.
We work with rePurpose Global, whose model is refreshingly literal: measure, reduce, offset. They help brands calculate the true footprint of their packaging and supply chain, hold them accountable to lowering it, and then fund the recovery of an equivalent weight of additional, verified plastic waste from the environment, concentrated in the places where leakage into oceans and waterways is worst, like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Ghana, and Kenya. We're clear-eyed that offsetting is not a license to use more, and we treat it that way. It's a way of answering for what's left after we've already designed out as much as we can.
Committing to Net-Zero Through The Climate Pledge
Plastic is the most visible part of our footprint, but it isn't the whole of it. Carbon is the part you can't see, which makes it easier to ignore, so we signed up to be held to a deadline.
We're a signatory of The Climate Pledge, the commitment co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, a full decade ahead of the Paris Agreement. For a company our size, that means measuring our emissions honestly, working to reduce them year over year, and sitting inside a community of businesses that have all agreed to the same timeline and the same reporting. It's a promise with a horizon well beyond any single campaign or any single July.
Bringing Sustainability In-House With a Chief Sustainability Officer
Commitments drift when no one's job is to defend them, so we made it someone's job.
We recently brought on Danielle Azoulay as our Chief Sustainability Officer. Danielle previously led CSR and sustainability for L'Oréal USA and built environmental programs at PVH and Marc Jacobs, and she's the founder of The CSO Shop and an adjunct professor at Harvard and Columbia University. In other words, she has spent a career turning sustainability from a sentiment into a strategy at the largest scale our industry operates. Bringing that expertise in-house at our stage, rather than bolting it on later, is a deliberate statement about where it sits on our priority list. It means the decisions in this post are made and stress-tested by someone who has done this work for real.
Getting Ahead of Producer Responsibility Laws
The rules around packaging are quietly changing, which is a net positive, and real action from our government. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws, already passed in states including California, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota, shift the responsibility and cost of packaging's end-of-life away from the public and onto the producers who created it. The Circular Action Alliance is the organization implementing those programs across states, and we're engaging with it now, by choice.
The honest reason is that we agree with the premise. Companies that create waste should help clean it up, and designing less waste into the system from the start is exactly what we were already trying to do. When the regulation catches up to the principle, we'd like to already be standing there.
Why It All Comes Back to Less
Strip away the certifications and partnerships and you're left with one idea, the same one we started the company on: that fewer, better things make more room. On your shelf, in your routine, and, it turns out, on the planet.
Plastic Free July is a useful nudge, and we hope you take it. Refuse the straw, keep the tote. But the version of it we believe in most isn't a single careful month. It's a product designed so well, and so sparingly, that it quietly takes a few things off your shelf and keeps them out of the waste stream for good. A straw refused is a good day. A product that never needed to exist is a better one.
All you need is less.
