Talking Trash with PACT Collective

Despite the exponential rise in clean, green, sustainable beauty & skincare campaigns, there’s still a huge environmental problem looming — packaging. 

While the formula you’re applying might be plant-derived, toxin-free etc. etc., once you soak up all that serum… what’s left is small, multi-material, unlabeled, containers that can’t be processed by your local recycling plant.

An estimated 120 billion beauty/wellness packages are produced each year, with most ending up in landfills or the ocean (Pact). Yikes.

Good thing somebody is taking action and that somebody is Pact Collective, a nonprofit collective uniting beauty industry players to reduce packaging waste, share intel, and innovate. 

If you’ve been in a Sephora, Nordstrom, Credo, or Ulta lately, you might have noticed their drop off bins. Pact partners with retailers and brands to collect beauty products that commercial recycling programs can’t handle.

As spring cleaning season kicks in, it’s the perfect time to rethink what we throw away. So far, Pact Collective has saved over 239,000 pounds of hard-to-recycle beauty packaging from landfills through their 2,800+ collection bins across the US and Canada. 

Virtually speaking, we sat down with Executive Director Carly Snider to talk about the future of sustainable beauty packaging.

What steps can brands take to ensure their packaging is compatible with curbside recycling, if any?

“Brands need to ask tough questions of their packaging suppliers to fully understand the recyclability of their packaging. Simply taking their word is not sufficient; any claims about recyclability should be validated by trusted organizations. Additionally, refer to recycling guides and tools produced by leading organizations such as the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) and the U.S. Plastics Pact, as their work is focused on addressing these complex issues. Pact supports our beauty industry members by providing member-exclusive resources to help our community navigate the complexities of designing for recyclability.”

If you are a new beauty brand trying to build sustainable packaging practices into your business model, this is for you:

Packaging should not be an afterthought. It’s the first thing consumers see when they meet your brand and critical to the holistic experience of your product. Overwhelmed? “Pact is dedicated to uniting the industry to share best practices, allowing us to tackle these complex issues together rather than in their brand silos. Remember, sustainability is a journey and it’s okay if you can’t do everything at once. Start by identifying your brand’s core values and build from there. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Take your consumers on the journey with you. Communicating your rationale and direction clearly will help establish transparency and consumer trust.”

Do you see any emerging trends or technologies that could transform the

beauty packaging landscape?

• “The gold standard is implementing refill and reuse models, as we cannot recycle our way to a circular economy. It’s essential to use packaging repeatedly because recycling is energy-intensive, and materials commonly used in the beauty industry, such as plastic, cannot be recycled indefinitely. Ultimately, these materials end up as waste.

• One important tip for brands is to ensure that when they adopt refill solutions, they are genuinely reducing material usage and reusing materials. It’s crucial not to jump on the trend without conducting thorough research. Brands should compare how their refill packaging minimizes carbon footprints effectively (and against single use products!).

• From a recycling perspective, we are enthusiastic about the advancements in recycling technologies such as AI and advanced optical sortation. These technologies are enabling our Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and recyclers to recover more materials that would have traditionally ended up in the trash. These innovations are particularly promising for small-format packaging, which is prevalent in the beauty industry.”

Where do the recycled materials from your facilities go — as in, what’s the afterlife of products recycled by Pact?

“We focus on finding the highest and best use for all material we collect. We prioritize the following respectively:

• Mechanical Recycling: the most mature recycling process that most people think of when they think of recycling (and also the most sustainable). We either upcycle material into another product (e.g. packaging) or downcycle it into a lower value item (e.g. warehouse pallets, flowerpots).

• Molecular Recycling: a method we sometimes use when mechanical recycling isn’t an option. Empties are reduced to chemical monomers that can then be used to build something else, like future beauty packaging.

• Waste-to-energy or waste-to-concrete: Packaging that cannot be used in any other way is burned. Pact doesn’t identify this as recycling but we consider it a better option than the landfill or environment. More on this process here.

• We also take our members’ obsolescence and unsellable products on the B2B side. In this case, we would first start with finding a donation solution. We work with our nonprofit networks to get these unsellable goods but completely usable products into the hands of people who need them!”

Sustainability spans the whole product life, from ingredient sourcing to disposal. Brands have a responsibility to make innovative packaging decisions, and consumers have the power to vote with their wallets and their recycling habits.

Next time you apply that final swoosh of blush or scoop the last dollop of moisturizer, think twice before tossing it in the trash. Chances are, there’s a Pact drop-off bin nearby, ready to give that packaging a second life.