Until now it’s been really difficult to recycle your personal care and beauty packaging. Unless it’s a seed-fused cardboard box, which let’s face it, is pretty rare, where do you dump your shampoo bottles, lipsticks, old compacts etc? You can’t toss them into your recycling bin, as most of the plastics won’t be recyclable and other bits are necessarily recyclable. Well now you absolutely can – thanks to Garnier.
Garnier have partnered with the awesome leader of “Upcycling,” Terracycle to create a “Beauty Brigade” program. Anyone can join this program for free. You simply sign-up, collect all your empty personal care packaging (you can also collect all your friends and neighbor’s too,) package it and send it in free-of-charge to Terracycle. Garnier foots the cost of shipping, so you simply download a free-shipping label.
This is a massive positive step in the beauty industry because personal care and beauty packaging accounts for 1/3 of all landfill waste! OMG – to think that all these beauty products are clogging up our landfills to that extent.
“Upcycling” is where a product that is waste or useless, is converted into a high quality product. This is what Terracycle does so well. There turn candy and cookie wrappers into backpacks and speakers, and now thanks to Garnier, they are going to convert all our beauty waste into playgrounds across the U.S. So your shampoo bottle will either become a jungle gym or a picnic table – how cool is that?
The reason why I love what Terracycle is doing, is because we can recycle all we want, but where does this stuff go? Much of our paper is shipped to China where the regulations in terms of pollution aren’t as stringent, and what about the other stuff? There has to be a market for recyclables and since the recession hit, that market has dwindled.
So just for today – join a Beauty Brigade at through Terracycle. You can set one up at your school, your church, or even your community center – the more bottles and jars, the better. The kicker? Garnier will donate 2 cents per unit to a charity of your choice, which could even be your school. Check out Terracycle’s other brigades too. I started a number of brigades at my daughter’s school last year and the kids just loved gathering all that trash in the knowledge that they were making a difference.
Totally love this program, going to contact them about participating in a couple of our LV community events… Thank you, so very much for always finding a way to making things right for our world…
I didn’t know shampoo bottles couldn’t be recycled. I’ve been throwing any plastic bottles of any kind I have into my recycling bin.
I’ve tried Teracycle before but found it difficult because they want you to wait until you have 50 or 100 of the item to send it in. I don’t have much space so I couldn’t hoard empty bags/containers like that. they also took about 2 months to send the prepaid label. the idea is great though. hopefully they’ve worked out the kinks since then.
Michelle
I think they have worked out kinks now. I also think the key is to galvanize your friends and neighbors into dropping their packaging off at your house. As far as bottles being recyclable – not all bottles are – only PET plastic, however, this brigade takes items that are not recyclable like compacts and lipsticks. Terracycle then takes the moving pieces apart and recycles what they can. No one else does this – so even if its a bit or a wait, it’s worth it!