The hairdressing industry has traditionally been wasteful because there were no solutions for the main waste streams like hair and metal foils contaminated with color. Moreover, 95% of beauty containers are thrown out after one use. However, since 2020, a growing interest in sustainability among both customers and salons has been noticed.
Scottish beauty companies Beauty Kitchen and Re are working to make the beauty industry more environmentally friendly by increasing the reuse of packaging. The customers of these companies can return their empty containers in order to be washed and reused. The washing facility used by Beauty Kitchen to clean and sanitize the containers is of medical-grade quality, comparable to what is used in hospitals or laboratories, ensuring that the containers are thoroughly cleaned and safe to be reused.
Jo Childley, co-fondatorul Beauty Kitchen și Re, spune că în trecut ambalajele reutilizabile erau norma în industria cosmetică și că efortul ei actual este inspirat de acele vremuri.
Jenn Linton, the owner of Linton and Mac hair salon in Aberdeen, says that her salon recycles almost everything, including color tubes, towels, and hair foils contaminated with color. In the past, it was difficult to recycle hair foils. However, the salon now separates them, making it possible to recycle them properly. Linton and Mac salon also recycles human hair, which was previously thrown away but is now collected and used in various ways. Some customers of Linton and Mac salon even take their hair clippings away to use as slug deterrents or compost for their gardens. The salon charges a "green fee" of £2 to cover the costs of their recycling initiatives.
Hair can be used in at least 10 different ways, including for making wigs, as an alternative to wool, for composting, and for art. It can also be woven into mats that can be used to clean up small oil spills on streets, gardens, or workplaces. Additionally, hair can be made into hair booms, which can be used as barriers to contain larger oil spills.
In 2021, the Green Salon Collective in Northern Ireland (a specialist recycling service that works with the hairdressing industry to prevent waste from ending up in landfills or being incinerated) used a hair boom made from 30-45kg of hair collected from salons to protect the shoreline from an oil spill. Overall, the collective had collected about 400kgs of hair, highlighting the potential for using hair as a sustainable resource. The Green Salon Collective in Northern Ireland now have about 1,000 member salons across the UK and Ireland. Another small victory is that the amount of hair foils being recycled has doubled, from 1% to 2%.
Source: bbc.com