Is Beauty Recyclable?

Is beauty recyclable?

It is, and perhaps one of the most influential industries for recycling. Rescu. spoke with Tom Szaky, founder of TerraCycle, to learn about his partnership with L’Oreal.  Tom is working along side L’Oreal to help drive the beauty world toward taking environmentally friendly approaches, and make it sexy at the same time. Read below RESCU’s interview with Tom Snaky.

RESCU: How did TerraCycle come to be? What inspired it? How did you go about turning it into your own business?

Tom Szaky: The roots of TerraCycle started when I was a freshman at Princeton, aged 19. At the time I was entering business plan competitions at school, so I created the model for TerraCycle to enable me to enter. The idea behind the company was actually inspired by a friend of mine in Canada who worked out that worm poo could be used as a fertiliser to help plants grow. I took this idea that using organic waste as a raw material could be something really profitable and exciting. It grew from there, and TerraCycle today is obviously quite different to its origins. We realised fertiliser was just the beginning, so expanded to look at collecting trash to turn it into new products. And that’s where we are today – taking waste that would otherwise go to landfill, and keeping it in the cycle.

RESCU: Tell us, how can you take something that is traditionally unrecyclable and make it recyclable?

Tom Szaky: Virtually everything is recyclable. We take things that you wouldn’t put in your local council bins and recycle them – and that’s objects from pens to chewing gum to chip packets. It’s all about looking at what something is made of and separating the components so that you can recycle them. The main reason why some items are deemed “unrecyclable” is the economics behind recycling them – often it costs more to process them than they’re worth. But we’re very lucky that our partners, such as L’Oreal, are taking positive steps forward to minimise the amount of waste that goes to landfill by financing these processes.

RESCU: How did your partnership with L’Oreal come to be? It’s obviously a natural fit…

Tom Szaky: We work with L’Oreal in a number of countries around the world – the US, Austria, and now here in Australia. We’ve had a great working relationship in other countries so it was a natural progression to launch in Australia. The beauty industry is obviously a huge driver of plastic waste, and it’s great that L’Oreal are so proactive in ensuring they minimise their footprint. The partnership with L’Oreal delivers the first national based beauty program in Australia, so it’s setting the benchmark for L’Oreal globally being the  first entity to commit all brands to the TerraCycle scheme (I.e. L’Oreal Paris, Garnier, and Maybelline to name a few)

RESCU: People follow trends and fads that are ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’, how do you see the beauty industry being influenced to recycle in the future?

Tom Szaky: We think recycling is pretty cool and sexy in itself! We recycle and upcycle waste into really neat things. In the US, for example, we took beauty product waste and made an upcycled palm tree. We also make clothing out of some of our waste streams. You’ll see in our very own TV show, Human Resources, that working with waste can actually be a lot of fun, which we hope will get people enthused about recycling.

And the great thing is that recycling is something everyone can agree on – it’s totally apolitical. We all know that rubbish is inherently bad, and there’s no one saying that excess waste is a good thing. I hope we see more companies taking responsibility for their waste from here on in.

RESCU: The beauty industry is influential in terms of recycling considering its number of recyclable products – how do you see this influencing the future of recycling?

Tom Szaky: I see the beauty industry’s influence as a very positive thing, and something that hopefully more industries will follow. The beauty industry is so prevalent in everyone’s lives, so hopefully it influences both other industries and consumers and educates them on recycling and the issue of waste.

RESCU: What’s your one take away message you have for all our beauties reading this?

Tom Szaky: Thanks to L’Oreal, you can recycle any brand of beauty product through this recycling program. So we’re encouraging everyone to send us their beauty product waste. By doing so, not only will you be helping the earth, but you’ll be giving back to the community – we award points for each piece of waste recycled, which can be converted to a cash donation to your chosen charity or school. We can all make a massive difference to the amount of waste that gets sent to landfill, and ultimately try and eliminate the idea of waste.