Life Cycle Assessment in the cosmetic sector: critical issues related to life cycle inventory data availability

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly employed for assessing the potential environmental impact of cosmetic products. However, findings of a preliminary literature review on LCAs in the cosmetic sector showed that there are critical issues related to the availability of life cycle inventory data for many cosmetic ingredients. Missing data is a key challenge facing LCA studies, indeed the scarcity of complete and reliable inventory data may limit the effectiveness of the analysis. In this context, this study intends to further investigate the results emerging from the literature analysis and verify the availability of life cycle inventory data for cosmetic ingredients in some of the most known and used commercial databases, namely Ecoinvent, Agri-footprint, European Life Cycle Database (ELCD), World Food LCA Database (WFLDB), and United States Life Cycle Inventory (USLCI). Following this aim a case-study on a cosmetic product has been performed. Primary data of a cosmetic solar cream were collected, and a list of 18 ingredients (each composed by one or more substances) was identified. Secondary data on the resulting 28 substances contained in the ingredients were then searched in the databases. Preliminary results confirm that inventory data for almost all the substances are missing in the considered databases. In details, the few inventory data available concerns a total of 5 substances (4 in Ecoinvent and 1 in Agri-footprint), allowing to obtain secondary data for only 6 of the 18 identified ingredients. Substances similar to those for which the lack of inventory data occurs are identified, as already proposed by other scholars when performing LCAs with missing data.