Design Life-Cycle
assess.design.(don't)consume
Perfume, a liquid product mixed with fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds and solvents can give subjects a pleasant scent. The history of perfume can go back to thousands of years. In the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Rome, and China, perfume was used to anoint the body and they can also be “added to water and other liquids for beautification and religious purposes”. It has been becoming more and more popular and affordable in modern society around the world. Chanel No 5, produced by a French businesswoman Coco Chanel in 1921, is one of the world's most iconic perfumes and it is still popular even after 100 years have passed. Behind its use of more than 80 ingredients, multi-layered formulation, and the perfect, complex, and fresh flavor, Chanel No 5 did a good job at energy saving. Throughout this paper, I will be going in-depth on the full life cycle of energy usage of Chanel No 5 during the processes of collecting raw materials, manufacturing, distributing, reusing, and recycling.
The energy usage during the raw material acquisition process of Chanel No 5 takes little energy. In order to produce a perfume, the designer needs to think of the flavor he/she desired to obtain for the final product. After that, designers will look for the raw materials that fit their ideal. Coco Chanel, a French fashion designer and the founder of the Chanel brand, used Rose centifolia, Jasmine, and Ylang-Ylang as main materials and other materials include orris root, iris root, and natural musks in perfume Chanel No 5. The flavor of the final product perfectly fits Coco’s standard so the formulation has hardly changed since 1921, 100 years ago from now. To be more specific about harvesting the raw materials, Chanel actually did a great job at reducing energy usage and protecting the environment. Ylang-ylang is harvested from Madagascar and Mayotte and rose centifolia and jasmine are harvested by hand at the Mul Family Estate near the town of Grasse, the world's perfume capital. Chanel stated that each 30 ml bottle of Chanel No 5 contains “no more than 12 May roses” and “requires 1,000 jasmine flowers”. To think of all the materials required for a bottle of perfume, the energy usage seems to be massive. The energy usage mainly comes from the plantation of raw materials. The harvest season of rose centifolia is in the month of May every year. It only lasts three weeks long, so harvesters need to work fast. According to the article, each harvester will work for “4 hours a day and each would be harvesting about 7,000 roses”. The supply chain isn’t affected too much by the COVID-19 pandemic because harvesters were able to work outside. The raw materials used in the products have mostly “come from regions with environmental and social challenges”. Chanel was invested in addressing these challenges as “part of their supply-chain resiliency strategy” to ensure the materials can be used for the long term and set a good example. They promoted the principles of regenerative agriculture and individual farmers’ income increased. So, Chanel is trying to ensure the sourcing of their raw materials is corresponding to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.
After harvesting raw materials, the next step is to produce the oil or fragrance concentrate for perfume. During the manufacturing process, Chanel No 5 takes less energy than I thought. The methods for extracting perfume oil include “solvent extraction, steam distillation, expression, enfleurage, or maceration”. As for Chanel No 5, the manufacturer uses solvent extraction to extract oil because other methods would be too invasive for precious raw materials like rose centifolia and jasmine, etc… Solvent extracting rose centifolia and jasmine can produce a highly fragrant and concentrated oil. During the process, the roses will be dumped into a vat, called an extractor. Then there are five levels in each extractor to separate the roses from being crushed. Once the vat is full, a heavy lid is clamped into place to seal the whole extractor. After that, hexane, a highly volatile solvent, is pumped into the vat to dissolve the molecules in the flowers and extract the principal fragrance. When the process is complete, the roses in the vat will be replaced by stacks of brown, soggy petals, and the rose extracts are consolidated and left at the bottle of the vat in the form of fragrant wax. “Nearly 400kg of roses are needed” to produce 1kg of fragrant wax and “over 7 million hand-picked jasmine flowers are needed” to produce 1 kg of fragrant wax. But after so many processes, this is not the end. The fragrant wax will be transferred into absolute. First, “the wax is blended with alcohol several times in mixers”. Then, the mixture is chilled and filtered to separate the wax from the liquid before it is steam-distilled to remove the alcohol. About “600g of roses absolute can be derived from 1kg of fragrance wax”. Imagining the complicated, cumbersome, and time-consuming steps to make perfume, some might think the process must be energy-consuming. While in fact, solvent extraction has a lower energy consumption and higher extraction efficiency than distillation.
Besides producing the fragrance, Chanel also puts a lot of effort into producing the glass bottle for Chanel No 5. The bottle was designed so successfully that the original bottle design has not changed much over the years. Moreover, the bottle had joined the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1959. It was “created in partnership with Pochet du Courval”, a company headquartered in France specializing in the manufacture of perfume bottles for the luxury industry. Coco wants the bottle to be crystal pure and transparent but the technology is a big challenge due to the lack of purity of the raw material. However, Pochet du Courval developed a new industrial process in order to guarantee the bottle's transparency that is ‘close to crystal’. The company used a high-end recycled glass for the perfume bottle and the glass bottle is recyclable. According to the company, "for every one million bottles of its recycled glass adopted, more than 25 tonnes of raw virgin material is saved." Also, the carbon footprint of the bottle is approximate “40 percent lower than a typical 50-milliliter perfume bottle” made by the same glass producer.
Transporting and distributing Chanel No 5 takes a lot of energy, but Chanel is working on a greener way to reduce energy use and emissions. As I mentioned above, Chanel No 5 is manufactured in Grasse, France. After the products have been produced, they will be shipped to distributors worldwide to sell the products. Chanel owns around 310 Chanel boutiques around the world and there are “94 in Asia, 70 in Europe, 10 in the Middle East, 128 in North America, 1 in Central America, 2 in South America, and 6 in Oceania.” Once they are ready, the fragrance will be shipped to these stores that are in need through airplanes or ships. Also, there is another option, which is to buy the product from Chanel’s online store. So customers can avoid travel to local stores to purchase perfume. Though there are no statistics about the energy consumption or carbon emissions of transporting the perfume Chanel No 5, we are able to find out that, via Chanel’s report in 2018, “the company’s emissions associated with transporting goods and people are approximately 162,000 tons CO2eq/year”. However, after the Paris Agreement, the company is making changes to approach and achieve a greener corporation. The action plans include packing optimization to reduce the volume of transport, shifting from air to sea transport where feasible, switching to electric vehicles, and further rationalizing elements of the supply chain, and increasing the volume of products shipped by sea.
Chanel actually has a unique service which is to refill the perfume bottle. However, there are a few requirements: labels that are indicating the new batch number can’t be removed, the bottle must be well preserved, which means the bottle can’t be damaged and the working pump and the push button are still on the bottle, and the service is “only available for N°5 L'EAU Eau de Toilette 100 ml, N°5 Eau de Parfum 100 ml, COCO MADEMOISELLE Eau de Parfum 100 ml, CHANCE EAU TENDRE Eau de Toilette 100 ml, and BLEU DE CHANEL Eau de Parfum 100 ml”. Thus, during this step, no energy is needed.
Recycling perfume bottle takes much less energy. After the perfume is used up, there are various ways to handle the perfume bottle. As I mentioned, the perfume bottle is recyclable, so the leftover glass bottle can be used to produce new bottles. While due to the successful design of Chanel No 5’s bottle, the bottle itself is still valuable and customers are more likely to collect the bottle instead of throwing it away easily like trash. The bottle can be used as a decoration or a vase after the nozzle has been pulled out and the bottle has been cleaned. Besides this, customers can also sell the entire bottle on eBay or Etsy. An empty perfume bottle can go around 20 dollars to 40 dollars and a vintage Chanel No 5 bottle can even go to around 100 dollars. Thus, the final disposal does not take much energy.
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