There is a lot you can do to make your beauty routine more sustainable. You could purchase fewer products, choose reusable or refillable options, and seek out natural and cruelty-free ingredients.
Once you squeeze all you can out of your must-have beauty products, give them a new purpose by recycling them through TerraCycle’s free beauty recycling programs in Australia and New Zealand. You can use these programs to recycle at home or drop off items at your favourite beauty retailers, so recycling fits seamlessly into your everyday routines.
The reason most products and packaging aren’t kerbside recyclable is that the cost of collecting and recycling beauty products would be greater than the value of the resulting recycled raw material.
Beauty product packaging like tubes, pumps, and makeup palettes are made of complex materials, including different types of rigid and flexible plastic, glass and metals.
TerraCycle can recycle hard-to-recycle materials like beauty empties because we work with brands, manufacturers and retailers who fund the costs of recycling to offer free programs to customers and the general public.
How does TerraCycle recycle beauty empties? Let’s step through the recycling process to learn how used cosmetics, hair care, and skincare packaging take on new shapes and sizes.
1. First, we receive and check-in your empty beauty products. When you send us your shipment of beauty waste, we receive it at one of our Material Recovery Facilities. When a shipment is opened, we do a visual inspection and sort out any non-compliant rubbish. We then scan your parcel to register the shipment information, date, weight, and type of material collected.
2. Then, we sort your used beauty packaging and separate it by material type.Empty beauty packaging often has residual product in it. Our process shreds and washes beauty packaging so that it can be properly separated and recycled. This is why you don’t have to clean your collection before sending it to us for recycling.
We sort and separate materials based on material characteristics and composition, using a wide variety of sorting technologies, so they can be properly recycled.
Plastics are processed by polymer type, so we first must separate them by using:
- Sink-float separation, which uses water to separate commingled plastics based on density.
- Air density separation, which uses fans to create a column of air. Low-density items like remaining paper from labels are blown upward and dense items fall.
- Optical sortation, where items are passed under an infrared sensor which records the light waves that bounce off each item. This allows us to sort plastic shreds by type of plastic material.
Metals must be separated through magnetic separation.
- Magnetic separation uses magnets to separate ‘ferrous’ metals, like steel, from other materials. The shreds are smelted into metal sheeting, ingots, rods and bars.
Glass is separated manually from other materials like metals and plastic. Glass fragrance bottles and glass cosmetic containers are made of different glass types which have different chemical compositions and melting points. This means the mixed glass can’t be melted down and recycled back into new glass. So, the mixed glass is crushed and size-reduced into aggregate for use in construction materials.
Aerosols are collected and recycled separately with a specialised aerosol recycler.
3. Finally, materials are used for new applications. Our sales team and processing partners sell the resulting materials to manufacturers who produce new products and complete the recycling journey. These end products may include things like shipping pallets, thermoform packaging, piping, conduit and other industrial products, outdoor furniture, and much more.
If you’re clearing out bathroom cupboards to refresh your beauty routine, make sure you’re recycling any empty or unusable beauty, skincare, and hair care products through TerraCycle.
Watch the behind-the-scenes tour below to learn more about our recycling process for beauty empties.
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