Saving Plastic

A partnership between two local brands sparked an environmentsaving process that’s ground breakingly simple

- Chelsea Tang 

Here’s the lowdown on recycling beauty products: It’s so. darn. inconvenient. Anyone who’s ever put their intention to recycle beauty empties into practice will know that saving the earth isn’t as simple as simply dumping used-up jars and tubs into the blue bin.

What’s making recycling difficult is the mixedmaterial packaging that beauty products come in.

The bulk of it are made of plastic containers (on average, bottles are made with about five plastics), mixed in with metals, and sometimes glass. To recycle these plastic bottles, you’ll have to first clean them out, then separate the plastic from the nonplastic. It’s a treacherously painstaking process (having tried to recycle my own stash of empties for years, I’d know) — there’s the removing of springs from pumps, the forking out of mirrors from makeup palettes, etc.