Click through to read about the role of recycling in the cosmetics industry today.
While some packaging suppliers rely on offsets to claim to remove ocean plastic, Seacliff Beauty is doing it quite literally.
Seacliff Beauty became the exclusive beauty supplier for the #tide ocean material plastic resin earlier this year and the company has spent the time since at trade shows and online promoting the new packaging option.
Brian Saputo, executive vice president of Seacliff, told CosmeticsDesign the partnership is part of broader efforts to curb the flow of plastic packaging into the world's landfills and oceans. For Seacliff and #tide specifically, that means pulling plastic out of waters near Malaysia to be turned back into packaging.
“If you go up 40,000 feet, the problem that we're trying to solve is how to close the loop,” Saputo said. “It is finding a solution for an ongoing problem and trying to, no pun intended, stem the tide of all this plastic going into the ocean, how we collect it and bring it back into the consumer world.”
As consumers are hungering for sustainable packaging, state legislators are pushing the consumer packaged goods industry to change how it does business.
Several states in the US have recently passed legislation that, when implemented, may affect not only brands but the broader packaging supply chain selling across regulatory boundaries.
Dan Felton, executive director of Ameripen, told CosmeticsDesign that while some level of sustainable packaging regulation isn’t entirely new to the CPG industry in the US, states like California are bringing in more aggressive standards.
“A lot of the policies that are coming out are making some of those sustainability decisions for the brand owners and manufacturers,” Felton said. “Companies are trying to do the right thing, but some policymakers are really pushing the envelope in making some decisions for those brand owners.”
Q&A
Pact Collective started around a year ago with a mission to help beauty become more circular, and the non-profit has several plans to tackle the industry's biggest waste problems.
CosmeticsDesign spoke with Pact Collective about how they are working towards a circular economy, why they believe that transition matters and what the challenges are.
Tell me a bit about Pact Collective’s mission around circularity in personal care and cosmetics.
The beauty and wellness industries generate over 120 billion packages every year, with most ending up in landfills or incinerators. The packaging is often too small, too flexible, or made of too many materials to be mechanically recycled through curbside recycling programs. Pact is on a mission to change this.
The beauty industry has been too focused on recycling and needs to shift focus on reuse and refill solutions, says two circular beauty brands, Bhuman and Emma Lewisham.
The use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials and the implementation of recycling programmes are not helping the beauty industry curtail its output of packaging waste.
Instead, the CEOs of two circular beauty brands are urging the industry to explore solutions that focus on the other two Rs of sustainability – reducing and reusing.
“In terms of the circularity hierarchy, we want to be looking at reducing, then reusing and recycling. I think there’s so much focus on recycling in beauty – it’s not the solution… I think when it comes to the discussion of circularity, there's too much focus on recycling versus actual reuse and refill and where I believe the beauty industry needs to go,” said Emma Lewisham, founder and CEO of Emma Lewisham.
Plastic packaging is important in the beauty industry and rePurpose Global wants to create impactful accountability for plastic waste made by personal care brands.
According to rePurpose, 91% of plastic waste doesn’t make it to recycling and ends up in the environment. Svanika Balasubramanian, CEO and co-founder of rePurpose Global, told CosmeticsDesign a major contributor to plastic in the environment is where the plastic in the recycling bin ends up.
Balasubramanian said rePurpose found that roughly 75% of plastic recycled in countries like the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland ends up in countries like India, Indonesia and Vietnam.
“These countries, unfortunately, don't have the necessary infrastructure to deal with their own domestic waste, let alone be this one giant garbage dump for the rest of the world,” Balasubramanian said. “That's why we're seeing so much of the waste leaking into nature.”
