Nancy Mahon is tackling sustainability from every angle

Change can be unnerving. But Nancy Mahon sees it as an opportunity for progress. This perspective makes her perhaps the perfect person to take on the recently created role of chief sustainability officer for beauty behemoth Estée Lauder Cos. (ELC) at a time when the cosmetics industry, like so many others, is under pressure to clean up its act and do right by the planet after years of promoting unsustainable consumer habits. 



“Growing up as a gay kid, I spent a lot of time thinking about change [and] how change happens,” says Mahon. In particular, she was interested in changing systems , and this fascination propelled her through law school, then into an early career working in government and nonprofits and foundations, focusing on such issues as criminal justice reform and HIV. “I never pictured myself working in corporate America, let alone in a beauty company,” Mahon says. But she realized change can’t happen without corporations. “We really need to have business at the table in a meaningful way. If you look at climate, we’re never hitting any of these goals if we don’t seriously change companies.”



Mahon’s remit—to weave sustainable practices into the fabric of a multibillion-dollar company that has historically profited by selling single-use beauty products—is not an easy one. It’s made more difficult by the fact that ELC comprises 29 very different beauty brands, from the plant-based bohemian line Aveda to luxury brand La Mer. Each has its own unique set of values and markets. A top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to sustainability won’t work here, so Mahon must be strategic in nudging the brands toward better practices and making change feel a little more palatable.



“You want to basically create a path and create safety for folks like the beauty industry or the fashion industry who are, candidly, very successful and who do have a large share of market and consumers, and essentially help create positive environmental and social impact in those companies,” Mahon says.



She firmly believes progress is possible, in part because she knows that being good for the planet is also good for business. Having spent 10 years embedded in ELC at the brand level before ascending to the corporate echelon, she was heavily involved in green initiatives including MAC’s closed-loop product-recycling program. She also oversaw a pilot project at Aveda to replace plastic packaging for samples with paper sachets in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Both were enormously popular: Customers returned more than 340,000 pounds of empty MAC products for recycling in 2022, and Aveda’s paper sachet is slated for a global rollout next year. “Consumers cared that we cared,” Mahon says. “That’s very exciting to me—that you can keep growing the company and also keep growing the good work.” 



When she took on the role of CSO, she wanted to maintain this focus on packaging. She assembled a five-person “climate team” that trains the president for each brand on best practices in packaging and emissions reduction, so sustainability becomes a priority at the outset, before a new product even hits the shelves. She doubled down on the shift from plastic to glass, which is more easily recycled. 



Last year, for example, Estée Lauder introduced recyclable glass jars for its Revitalizing Supreme+ Moisturizer. “Glass is better for the world overall than plastic,” Mahon says, but she’s not naive. She knows every choice comes with a tradeoff. “The complexity around glass, of course, is [that] it’s very carbon intensive because you have to heat it,” she says. “So, it’s a bit of a juggling game.” 



Glass is also heavier than plastic, which equates to more shipping emissions. So Mahon pushed to get rid of excess weight, making lids lighter and removing paper leaflets. The Revitalizing Supreme+ Moisturizer also comes with a refillable pod that the company says reduces packaging weight by 90%. She encourages brands to design containers made of a single material so they can be more easily recycled. At the end of fiscal 2023, at least nine ELC brands were offering refillable containers on select products. The company announced that 71% of its packaging by weight is now recyclable, refillable, reusable, recycled, or recoverable, nearing the 75% target the company set back in 2019. 



ELC is already technically carbon-neutral when it comes to the greenhouse gas emissions that come directly from its own operations. So, Mahon set her sights on emissions from the company’s supply chain. Recently, ELC became the first beauty company to join the Supplier Leadership on Climate Transition (Supplier LOCT) , which helps suppliers understand and cut their emissions. 



She spends a lot of time engaging with suppliers herself, and under her leadership, the number of ELC’s suppliers working with the LOCT program has more than doubled. “Your relationship with your suppliers . . . you’re responsible in some ways for how they run their business,” Mahon says, adding: “What we want to do, particularly with our suppliers, is make sure that we’re essentially rewarding businesses that are carbon-neutral.”



On the retail side of things, Mahon’s team decided to revamp the storefront in a more sustainable image. In 2023, the company launched its “ Responsible Store Design Program .” Participating stores must demonstrably reduce water usage, have a waste management plan, install energy-efficient technologies, avoid using virgin plastic in displays, and provide product applicators made of sustainable materials. “We own most of these stores,” Mahon says. “And so the environmental footprint of the stores is ours.”



At Mahon’s insistence, a third party now audits the participating stores to ensure they’re up to snuff. The program began with five storefronts in China and has expanded to 18 in various regions globally, with more on the way. A total of 35 locations have applied for certification so far.



“The bottom line is that our stores and our physical footprints are a huge piece of how we show up in the world,” Mahon says. Not every store is going to be “responsible,” she says, just as the beauty industry isn’t going to pivot to 100% sustainable practices overnight. But “the thing that we have to remember in all of this work is it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” she says. “We have to move incrementally.”