When it comes to product development,real time decisions require real time data– and when it comes to environmental data, that often means curating thousands of data sets into legible analysis for a product developer to evaluate easily. That’s where the Sustainable Innovation Profiler, a patent‑pending, science‑based, decision‑support tool developed by Kenvue, comes in.
Designed to help enable environmental performance evaluations during the product design cycle, the Profiler was launched with 600 users across our R&D team and is today integrated into our innovation. It also helps enable our Healthy Lives Mission commitment to ensure that75% of new product development can demonstrate improved environmental performance by 2030.
We are proud to share the science behind Kenvue’s Sustainable Innovation Profiler methodology for the first time. The methodology document outlines its purpose, scope, assumptions, and calculation methods. By making this incredibly robust work public,we hope to raise the bar on sustainable product innovation as well as invite the scientific community to give us feedback as we continue to evolve our approach.The Sustainable Innovation Profiler assesses formulated products across categories such as skin care, oral care, OTC medicines, nutritionals, and hair care, while excluding certain product types (e.g., engineered products, aerosols, and refill formats), with plans to expand scope over time.
The Sustainable Innovation Profiler evaluates products across four core metrics;all compared against an appropriate baseline product:
- Product Environmental Footprint–Cradle‑to‑grave life cycle assessment methodology that assesses16 environmental impact categories (e.g., climate change, water use, land use, human toxicity)in alignment with EF3.1. Results are normalized, weighted, and aggregated into a single score.
- Product Carbon Footprint– Focuses specifically on greenhouse gas emissions over the product life cycle, aligned with IPCC AR6 GWP100 methodology.
- Green Chemistry– Evaluates formulation ingredients based on environmental hazard at end of life, presence of emerging‑concern ingredients, and renewable origin, guided by selected principles of Green Chemistry.
- Packaging Circularity– Assesses packaging sustainability through post‑consumer recycled content, material efficiency,recycle‑ready design, and the absence of recyclability disruptors, aligned withKenvue’s sustainable packaging commitments.
For a product to be classified as having improved environmental performance, it must show improvement in at least one metric without regression in any others. Each metric is then scored on a standardized scale ranging from excellent to very poor.
Learn more by downloading the Sustainable Innovation Profiler methodology.