Understanding the Environmental Impact of Beauty Products
Attention beauty lovers: your vanity drawer is not just a graveyard for expired mascara and questionable lipstick choices—it’s a mini landfill! Beauty is one of the fastest-growing consumer categories, with customers spending over 94 billion dollars on the category just in the past year [1]. But with an uptick in consumer spending comes a massive increase in waste.
The Packaging Problem in the Beauty Industry
The beauty and wellness industry generates over 120 billion packages annually, but only a fraction get recycled because of how they are designed [2].
Many beauty companies are now changing their packaging, product development, and supply chain processes and taking other sustainability measures. But are these efforts enough?
Sephora’s Initiative for Sustainable Packaging
Sephora, one of the biggest beauty retailers, introduced its collaboration with the nonprofit PACT collective in 2023. PACT, founded by cosmetic brand MOB Beauty and clean beauty retailer Credo Beauty, aims to reduce waste. The collective’s primary goals are to take responsibility for the industry’s packaging waste and work towards circular packaging.
Through this collaboration, many beauty products and packaging that would have gone to landfills are now being recycled. Bins are now available in all Sephora locations across the US and Canada.
How Sephora’s Recycling Program Works
You’ve decided that you are ready to make a difference and take the next step. Amazing! Follow the tips below to ensure the recycling process goes smoothly.
- Finish your beauty products you are thinking of recycling.
- Make sure that you visit Sephora’s site to see which of your empties would be accepted and recycled. As mentioned above, the parameters are specific but the products don’t have to be from Sephora!
- Clean your empties! Ensure any packaging is clean, unbagged, and free of any product.
- Head over to your nearest Sephora and drop them into the bin! Where each store keeps its bin may vary, but the most common areas are near the door or by the registers.
Congrats! You’ve officially helped close the loop on hard-to-recycle packaging and ensured empties don’t go to waste. Once you drop off your empties, they can be mechanically recycled, downcycled, molecularly recycled, or converted into energy [3].
The empties don’t have to be Sephora-specific products but can be from any retailer as long as they fit the collection guidelines, so bring in that MAC lipstick or Milani setting spray! The program allows many components to be recycled, including plastic, colored glass, and mixed materials.
The guidelines are particular, and certain things can only be checked locally within the store. Some can only be recycled at home, and many must still be trashed, but you can find the complete guidelines here.
Sephora has recently gamified this sustainability effort, too, with Beauty Insider Challenges on the Sephora app. The Responsible Beauty challenge allows customers to receive 100 Beauty Insider points for completing tasks. These tasks include skipping a bag, Buying Clean Sephora products, or dropping off beauty empties at these bins.
The Impact of Sephora’s PACT Program
Previously, Sephora worked with G2 Revolution, a specialty recycling solutions company, to divert more than 23 million pounds of returned, damaged, or expired cosmetic product waste from landfills [4]. But, this was only business-facing. This new PACT program is the next step, a customer-facing effort.
As of April 2024, the program has collected more than 10,860 pounds of hard-to-recycle material, equivalent to approximately 217,220 lipstick tubes [4]. For Sephora to make these changes towards sustainability and circularity is major, especially after only a year!
How Sephora’s Recycling Progam Can Be Even Better
Despite this program being a step in the right direction, more must be done.
Sephora needs to let their customers know the program exists! Even though the PACT collaboration has been running for a year, many customers don’t know it exists.
When I mentioned it to my friends and family members, none of them knew about the program. This is a huge marketing problem for the brand, especially since the marketing materials on Sephora’s website aren’t up-to-date.
My first suggestion is that Sephora updates its promotional materials to reflect the program’s current state. Another is to do a bigger marketing push to raise awareness and visibility. Though the brand’s current marketing spend is unknown, AdAge estimated in 2020 that it spent $14 million annually on measured media (such as TV and radio) [6]. This number has likely only increased, making even one commercial about the bins and customers throwing their empties in them worth it.
Improve Sephora’s Recycling Guidelines for Clarity
Even though PACT’s guidelines are easy to find, Sephora’s page for the program is a bit unclear. The items they do not accept, such as plastic packaging over 2×2 inches, will still go into the trash and eventually a landfill or the ocean.
Sephora’s website doesn’t provide much information about the program; instead, it redirects customers to the PACTs website. Including more critical information would reduce confusion and lead to less redirection. Offering this information would also show their commitment to sustainability.
Expand Sephora’s Recycling Efforts Globally
Sephora is available in many global markets, but this program is only available in the US and Canada. Despite these being essential markets for the brand, other popular global markets like the UK, Australia, China, and Mexico would be great places to expand this program.
Our planet and our future are more important than a brand’s monetary value in the long run. Expanding this program to other markets lets customers see that the brand values sustainability beyond its biggest markets.
Enhance Customer Engagement with more Sustainability Content
The last thing I want to see is that the program has more impact than recycling. Yes, this is the most crucial part of the program. However, if the brand came out with related content, it would make a huge difference. These could include videos about their sustainability efforts, regular updates about their impact, and education about why sustainability is essential in beauty.
Although the program is an excellent step in the right direction, it’s still insufficient. These suggestions help the program grow and keep moving the brand closer to circularity. Sustainability in beauty will only get more critical as time goes on, and because of this, brands and customers need to work together to lessen the industry’s impact.
So next time you find yourself at Sephora looking to impulse buy the latest viral beauty product you saw on TikTok that you don’t need (no judgment, we’ve all been there), remember to bring your empties!
–Nina Dagaev
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