Did you know that around 50% of Brits do not recycle their bathroom waste? This means that plastic bottles from your shampoo, conditioner and other products go straight into landfills. One reason for this is simply inconvenience.
This excess waste contributes to plastic pollution in our environment, and causes issues like extinction, climate change and habitat loss.
Find out why plastic is a problem for our environment and which small changes you can make to live a little bit greener each day.
WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
You may think that one or two bottles in your general waste bin doesn’t add up to a lot, but this actually equates to 2.7 billion plastic bottles hitting our landfills each year.
Whilst plastic is a highly durable material, making it a popular choice of packaging in cosmetics, food and other industries, it can take up to centuries to degrade. This, paired with plastic packaging not being recycled correctly, means that it can pollute our ecosystem by flooding our oceans and lands.
Plastic packaging and microbeads are particularly harmful to marine life where animals get tangled up in litter and can even ingest it, harming the food chain as a whole.
Globally, only 9% of plastic is recycled.
In the beauty industry alone, 95% of packaging is thrown out after one use and only 14% of this makes it to a recycling centre.
HOW CAN I REDUCE MY PLASTIC WASTE AT HOME?
Recycling is one of the best ways we can reduce our waste at home. By separating our general waste from recyclable materials, we are conserving resources that can be turned into other things.
One simple tip that you might not have thought of is putting a recycling bin in your bathroom!
As we mentioned before, around half of people in the UK do not recycle their bathroom waste because of the inconvenience. However, a lot more people recycle their kitchen waste.
Having a recycling bin in your bathroom will encourage you to recycle those plastic bottles and save them from going into landfills.
There are also lots of other options to make your beauty routines a little greener! From using reusable bamboo pads to investing in multi-use products to further reduce waste and save money!
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HOW IS EVOLVE BEAUTY TACKLING THE PLASTIC PROBLEM?
As a company, we’re committed to reducing our plastic waste as much as possible.
This is why we’ve implemented several strategies to help us and everyone at home reduce their plastic waste. This includes being a Plastic Negative beauty brand and reducing our plastic packaging.
PLASTIC NEGATIVE
In January, we published our first ever Sustainability Report. This is a report that we will now release each year to outline our sustainability goals and hopes for the future. We broke this down into five key sustainability pillars, one of which is being Zero Waste - an initiative on how we tackle the problem with plastic.
As a company, we already try to use as little plastic as possible. 60% of our packaging contains some recycled element to it and all plastic bottles and lids are 100% recyclable.
However, we want to go the extra mile in our journey to becoming a circular beauty brand by reducing our waste as much as possible.
Our partnership with rePurpose Global is a project that helps to remove twice as much plastic from the environment as we use in our packaging and shipping. It takes place in Aurangabad, India, helping to eliminate multi-layered plastic from the environment.
This year, we hope to remove 10,680kgs of plastic from the environment and save 30kg of CO2 emissions!
Our partnership also helps to provide 150 workers and families with additional income, and it also means that we are the UK’s first Plastic Negative beauty brand!
We are so proud to be leading the change against plastic as a beauty brand and to have each product carry a Plastic Negative Footprint. This means that whenever you purchase a product with Evolve Beauty, you are also helping to reduce plastic waste in the environment!
DUMP THE PUMP
Earlier this year, we set out a campaign to encourage everyone at home to become a little more greener in their everyday lives through Dump the Pump.
The goal is to reduce personal care plastic by encouraging customers to reuse their existing pumps and purchase refillables across our range.
Pumps are a particular problem in the beauty industry as they have metal and plastic components to them, making it difficult to recycle. They are also usually thrown out after one use, meaning that pumps are continually repurchased time and time again.
We want to encourage customers that making a small change to their beauty routines can amount to a huge difference in the amount of plastic that is saved from the environment. So whenever someone purchases a pump-free product, another piece of plastic is saved from landfills!
Having launched this initiative in January, we have saved 1,100 pumps since January!
We hope to continue expanding our pumpless range so our customers can shop pump-free!
Shop our pumpless range here.
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We're the First Plastic Negative Beauty Brand in the UK
