Good foundations: The challenge of recycling beauty products

When Sarah Bacon launched her skincare brand three years ago, her ethos was ethicality. Velettà, based out of her Seatoun home in Wellington, is vegan, cruelty-free, halal-certified, and set on reducing its carbon footprint.

It wasn't until a few months after it launched that she realised her beautiful bespoke bottles couldn't be recycled.

They were made of frosted glass, which stopped UV light damaging the products. "I just didn't want to introduce any more plastic into the world," she said.

"I just couldn't find anywhere in New Zealand that would recycle frosted glass."

READ MORE: * New consumer-pays service finds homes for the hard to recycle * Plastics 'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares * Nelson takes 'ethical' stand on plastic recycling

This was not a new problem for the makeup industry; most beauty products and their packaging were not recyclable, according to TerraCycle general manager Jean Bailliard, because of their complexity.

Take, for example, a foundation bottle with a pump. The bottle may be one type of plastic, perhaps HDPE,​ a "pretty easy product to recycle", but the cap might be polypropylene and contain a metal spring.

Small items like mascara or lipstick were complex, with layers of different materials. Dark-coloured plastic was recyclable, but its value was lower than clear plastic.

The added effort of splitting those components up made the cost of recycling that bottle just too high for most companies to justify.

TerraCycle had made it their mission to recycle products not accepted elsewhere, and was able to cover the extra cost by putting it back on the companies.

"Frosted glass isn't accepted in municipal recycling because it's treated with chemicals that would cause it to explode when heated during the recycling process," Bailliard said.

"We manually sort and separate the material for processing where it is ground down and used as road base."

There were plenty of incentives for companies to provide recycling options for customers, even when they had to pay for it themselves.

People were becoming "more aware of the impact they have on the environment", he said. "Consumers are asking brands for a solution.

"You don't want to be the last company with a solution."

When you factored in pressure from Government and the individual targets set by the bigger companies who owned these beauty brands, it amounted to an increasing willingness of brands to front the cost of sustainability.

Based in the United States, TerraCycle had been operating in New Zealand for the past 6 years, and recently began recycling beauty waste for any brand at 18 MECCA stores across New Zealand by way of their Zero Waste Box.

The bin arrived in flatpack form ready to assemble by the owner, and when full it was sent to TerraCycle's Auckland warehouse. "We recycle everything, including the plastic bag inside," Bailliard said.

"Depending on the product, we recycle locally if we can; if not, we recycle it in the US."

It might sound like a lot of transportation and a big carbon footprint, but the company had done "life cycle analysis", Bailliard said, where every step was mapped and the carbon footprint weighed up against the alternatives.

To keep transport costs low, bales of waste were compressed as small as they would go before they left the warehouse.

Bailliard said 70 per cent of recyclable waste in New Zealand was exported - with a small population, there wasn't enough waste to make recycling it financially viable.

Lasers identified the type of plastic, and thin jets of air pushed pieces into the correct bin. It was impressive to watch, Bailliard said, with plastic shooting in all directions.

Another method resembled a swimming pool, where the heavier plastics sunk to the bottom, and the lighter ones scraped off the top.

A lot of carbon was saved at the refining stage, which TerraCycle skipped completely. Each type was melted down into pellets and sold to other companies as a raw material.

Bacon came across the Zero Waste Box, a bin measuring just over a metre in height with a 30cm square base, intended for businesses to collect used products and packaging from their customers.

After only a month, she was close to filling her first box of Velettà bottles. "People had been stockpiling them, waiting for a solution," she said.

It was an added cost, but a necessary one. "I can't say that I’m an ethical company if I’m not actually providing a solution."

"Smaller companies, because they’re more fleet-footed, really are spearheading some of the more innovative methods of recycling or refilling."