Today is Earth Hour, which means it's time to switch off your household lights for one hour at 8.30pm, a symbolic gesture carried out by people around the world as a sign of solidarity. There are, however, many ways to show you care about our planet's future at any time of the year, and getting a grasp on your beauty packaging is a simple way to play your part.
According to Jean Bailliard, general manager of TerraCycle in Australia and New Zealand, the material make-up of a beauty product can be complex from the outside in. For example, a plastic mirror compact might have a glass mirror and foam inserts.
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"The more complex and varied the materials, the harder it is to recycle - and the less chance an item will be accepted in kerbside recycling," he says.
"Quite simply, the cost of labour required to manually identify, separate, clean and sort the components is too great. Smaller items, like mascara and lipsticks, are too small to be processed by industrial recycling machines."
To tackle the problem of waste in the beauty industry, TerraCycle has partnered with some of the biggest brands in Australia to provide free recycling solutions for beauty products. For example, households can ship any brand of hair care products and aerosols for free thanks to its partnership with Schwarzkopf.
"Our network of collectors can also recycle all skincare empties through our brand new program with Olay," says Jean. "If you're dedicated to using one particular brand, we have partnerships with the likes of Garnier or Sukin to ship their brand of products to TerraCycle for free to be recycled.
"We have a growing network of in-store drop-off points including David Jones and MECCA stores, and all Priceline stores thanks to a partnership with Maybelline. If you want to take it a step further, many of our brand partners such as Kiehls, L'Occitane allow you to refill and recycle in-store."
