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No recycled content. No recovery program. Destined for landfill, incineration, or (worse yet) the environment.
This probably doesn’t sound like a recipe for success in sustainability to you. It didn’t sound too good for two beauty industry veterans, either. Mia Davis is Vice President of Sustainability and Impact at Credo Beauty and Victor Casale is Co-Founder and CEO of MOB Beauty. They saw the problem in the beauty packaging space and decided to do something about it by starting Pact Collective.
As its website describes it, “Pact exists to share information transparently and effectively educate industry stakeholders so we can take responsibility for the waste we generate.” The collective consists of more than 130 member companies from all parts of the beauty value chain. Notable members of the collective include Sephora and Eastman Chemical, and Pact is working to add several multinational beauty brands this year to further scale its impact.
I had a chance to sit down and chat with Davis a couple of weeks ago to talk about Pact’s origins, goals, and early progress.
Why Collective Agreement? Because right now?
Let’s start with a basic understanding of scale here. Approximately 120 billion beauty and wellness packages are produced each year. That’s a lot of packages, more than 27 per global consumer.
Davis has expertise in safe ingredients for beauty products. It dates back to her days as organizing director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics from 2007 to 2011. However, I know as well as anyone that it can start by looking at the chemical dangers of ingredients and quickly snowballs to include where and how those ingredients are sourced, where waste exists in the system, and what can be done to improve packaging.
Approximately 120 billion beauty and wellness packages are produced each year. That’s a lot of packages, more than 27 per global consumer.
“Beauty product packaging is often too small to be collected and sorted by a standard material recovery facility. [or MRF] equipment,” Davis said. “And surprisingly few of those little jars, caps and tubes have resin identification codes or disposal instructions. Without this basic information, both customers and manual sorters at facilities like Pact’s can’t quickly and easily determine what material they have.”
So what is needed to increase the sustainability of packaging in this industry? Pact Collective’s theory of change is based on four key principles.
1. Supply
The founders of Pact understand that if there was a single solution to the beauty product packaging challenge, then the collective would not have to exist. The key to Pact’s sourcing guide is relatively simple: choose the best set of materials for the application, and choose the material that is most likely to be reused or recycled within that set.
2. Design
This (for me) is where the real innovation lies. Pact offers eight tips for designers. Some of my favorites:
Design for reuse Reduce the amount of packaging Use the highest possible post-consumer recycled (PCR) content
For me, design is the most exciting space we can focus on when it comes to packaging. As architect, designer and author William McDonough often says, “Design is the first sign of human intent.” In general, I am not optimistic, but I do believe that there are people creative enough to design a sustainable future if brands are willing to try new things and experiment.
3. Education
If you’re like me, you start wondering if something can be recycled before you even buy it. You look at the thing and say, “Yeah, I’m sure this can be recycled somewhere.” I tend to make mistakes due to the enormous gap between theoretical and practical recycling. Pact is pushing for more transparency in labeling so product users don’t have to guess.
However, one way to improve education is better labeling. “Suppliers must make packaging that is accurately labeled and we must immediately stop buying packaging that is not [labeled for recycling]Davis said. “The idea that it’s ‘too hard’ to put a resin code on a beauty package is so narrow, a poor excuse. When we mandate truth in labeling, through regulatory and market policies, we will see packaging suppliers make materials that can actually be recycled into MRF.”
4. End of life
What really happens between our sidewalks and the next life of a piece of packaging? For most beauty and wellness packaging, it’s landfill or incineration. Therefore, there is not much of an afterlife at all.
What does this dictate? First, the selection of materials. Much of this packaging uses materials that cannot be recycled or have no market for recycling. The second is the size. As mentioned above, most MRFs have great difficulty separating small packages and keeping them in the recycling stream. That means that even if beauty and wellness packaging is recyclable and marked as such, much of it is literally falling through the cracks and ending up in landfills, incinerators, or (worse) in the environment.
The idea that it is ‘too hard’ to put a resin code on a beauty pack is very limited. It’s a poor excuse.
Pact Collective is addressing this issue to some degree by creating take-back programs and manually sorting materials to learn what is in the packaging mix. This return, sorting, and eventual sale directly to recycling markets will allow Compact members to gain invaluable data as they work to innovate packaging solutions for the future. However, manual sorting is clearly not a scalable model in North America due to labor costs, so it should be seen as a transition solution to get us to the next step.
Collectives like this promise to make entire industries more sustainable if they can engage the entire supply chain and expect real change from their members. I look forward to following Pact as it grows and evolves. Hopefully, it will build a movement in the beauty industry that can increase circularity and provide a template for other industries to improve as well.
Source: news.google.com