As a fan of Burt’s Bees myself, I admire everything about the company and its products. The way their chapstick smells, its beautiful presentation, and what it costs. But where do the resources that make my chapstick come from? In this research paper I will be evaluating Burt’s Bees Chapstick and determining whether or not the product is sustainable. Examining numerical data, key ingredients, packaging details, examples of how the company may or may not meet the standards of the triple bottom line and the ways which Burt’s Bees contributes to society as a whole.
Before making any judgments it is important to take into consideration how this company came to be. Burt’s Bees originated in Maine in 1984 as a candlemaking partnership between co-founders Roxanne Quimby and Burt Shavitz. Essentially Burt Shavitz, the man whose name the company takes after, owned a honey business from which he fostered thirty hives and up kept them himself. Then came Roxanne Quimby, the woman with a plan. Her idea was to use the excess beeswax produced by Mr. Shavitz’s bees to make high quality candles and other home remedies. According to Quimby, “I pretended I was interested in the bees but, I was really interested in Burt. Here was this lone beekeeper who sells honey out of the back of his truck during hunting season”. After making the profits they were, the two looked into expanding and developing the company on a larger scale.
Setting up shop in Maine, the companies first headquarters was an abandoned one-room schoolhouse which they rented from a friend for one hundred and fifty dollars a year. Moreover, in 1989 the two received a phone call from a New York Boutique for an order of hundreds of their beeswax candles. Due to the increase in demand for Burt’s Bees products, the company hired forty additional employees. This was the turning point. This was a sign of success.
The increasing demand for natural soaps, perfumes, and eventually lip balm led the business to a necessitative move to North Carolina where the personal care industry offered a greater insight. Meaning, there were people in North Carolina negotiating and making deals that weren’t as popular in Maine. After launching its toothpaste, infant products, and shampoos in 2003, co-founder Roxanne Quimby used a large sum of company earned profit to preserve over one hundred and eighty five thousand acres of forest in Maine (Harrison, 2006). Continuing on the company developed relations with The Nature Conservancy, an organization based on “engaging in environmental protection and conservation”. This was a significant threshold for Quimby because this marked the start of Burt’s Bees initiative to become more sustainable.
Burt’s Bees mission statement:
“Most companies look out for the bottom line. We do, too. In fact, we have a triple bottom line: people, profit, planet. You can’t have one without the other two. So when we look after our own, we mean everybody: our employees, our customers, our families, ourselves. And yes, our environment, too. Our ingredients—right down to the packaging—are simple, natural, and responsible. We practice what we preach—and we hope to set the example for others to follow” (Burt’s Bees, 2017).
In the rest of my paper I will be analyzing the company as a whole, including waste, production, material resources, end life production, social and environmental impacts; packaging components, ingredient lists, and overall naturality of its products. I will provide statistical data along with sustainability reports considering their corporate responsibilities.
As a company that offers a wide range of naturally scented products, Burt’s Bees using a number of ingredients including açaí berry, almond, aloe, beeswax, buttermilk, cocoa butter, cotton, cranberry, eucalyptus, flower waxes, honey, kokum butter, lavender, lemon, mango, orange, peppermint, pomegranate, royal jelly, shea butter, sunflower, and willow bark is a sustainable way to conduct a business. As these products are not animal tested, they include ingredients complimentary to the human body; Formulated without phthalates, parabens, petrolatum or SLS.
For the lip balm, there are only four steps in the manufacturing process. First, the honey is collected in Tanzania, East Africa. That is then shipped to North Carolina where the mixing of ingredients goes on. Second, the honey and beeswax is mixed together in a large tank with coconut oil, sunflower oil, vitamin E, rosemary leaf extract, and peppermint oil. The third step is filling the tubes. Several thousands of tubes are filled per minute, they’re then cooled and chilled until textural perfection. Once the containers are capped, they get wrapped.
Each lip balm is wrapped with its specific label and it is then put in a box for any cardboard or plastic packaging necessary for presentation. This leads us to discuss the environmental sustainability of the products packaging.
At Burt’s Bees, “our packaging is designed conscientiously: including our focus using post-consumer recycled content. Currently, our primary package containers average 34% PCR content, our plastic bottles average 71% PCR, and our secondary packages average 36%. In addition, we strive to make our packages as recyclable as possible, and 89% of our primary packaging is made with recyclable materials. Finally, we have trimmed excess packaging from many of our products – some as much as 50%” (Burt’s Bees, 2017). Significantly, post consumer recycled plastic is made of other re-usable or reused plastics that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill. By committing to this notion of post consumer plastics, Burt’s Bees can accomplish the hopes of eventually producing zero waste. “Lip balm and lip shimmer packaging labels are shrink-wrap free. By simply extending our label, we were able to eliminate 1,800 miles of shrink-wrap from our waste stream in one year – enough to wrap the Statue of Liberty 100 times!” (Burt’s Bees, 2017). In all, Burt’s Bees strives to use materials that have very little impact on the environment thus creating opportunity to reduce more waste.
In addition, Burt’s Bees is a member of both the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and Sustainable Packaging Cosmetics Roundtable, which aid the company in becoming learners as well as leaders in the sustainability movement.
Committed to treating their employees fair and just, Burt’s Bees provides consumers and employees with several lines of skin and body care using sustainable practices.
“Burt’s Bees aims to positively impact its community and all its inhabitants by treating its employees with respect, holding suppliers to high social responsibility standards, and remaining committed to never testing on animals” (CSRWire, 2008)
They’re also dedicated to preserving biodiversity in forest regions as well as highly populated bee areas across the globe. According to the Burt’s Bees corporate social responsibility report, the company closes its operations for a day to take the whole company out to build playgrounds for the community. “For sustainable agriculture and community gardening projects, which have been shown to have a positive effect on human and honeybee health. This focus was chosen against the backdrop of the decline in human health due to a lack of access to healthy food and the alarming number of bee declines in the United States” (Burt’s Bees, 2012). Considering that Burt’s Bees is now owned by The Clorox Company, Burt’s Bees also strives to push its mother corporation to clean up its act and join the sustainability movement. For instance, “They have begun ‘Dumpster Diving’ to educate employees about waste reduction and they now have an Eco-team, as we do” (Burt’s Bees, 2017).
Economically, the Burt’s Bees company tries to make its product as affordable as possible. Seeing as a majority of their products are “natural”, $3.30 for lip balm, $9.00 for lip gloss, $13.00 for facial moisturizer, and $10.00 for 12 Oz body lotion sounds like a reasonable price compared to competing companies like Chapstick, whose animal and non-natural tested lip balm costs just $1.00. In efforts to preserve animal wildlife, particularly for Bees, the company is also contributing to the economy on an international scale.
According to beespotter.org, “In North America around 30% of the food humans consume is produced from bee pollinated plant life. The value of pollination by bees is estimated around $16 billion in the US alone.” This is significant to note because this means both The Clorox Company and Burt’s Bees alone are saving the economy little by little in attempt to preserve and save the bees.
After analyzing a couple of Burt’s Bees key operations and manufacturing processes, i’ve come to the conclusion that the company is indeed a sustainable one. Providing the public with several skin care products, a majority of which are one hundred percent natural, Burt’s Bees fulfills its corporate responsibility environmentally, socially, and economically. Though they haven’t yet reached their goal of achieving zero waste, the company continues to use post consumer plastics and natural ingredients, all the while selling their products at a fair price. Through promotion and advocacy, Burt’s Bees serves as a catalyst in converting larger corporations to become more sustainable. In efforts to preserve both the environment and our global community, the Burt’s Bees brand represents the environmental tenacity that the sustainability movement demands.
