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No recycled content. No take-back program. Destined for landfill, incineration or (worse) the environment.
This may not sound like a recipe for sustainability success to you. It doesn’t sit well with two veterans of the beauty products industry either. Mia Davis is vice president of sustainability and impact at Credo Beauty and Victor Casale is cofounder and CEO of MOB Beauty. They saw a problem in the beauty packaging space and decided to do something about it by starting Pact Collective.
As it describes on its website, “Pact exists to share information clearly and educate stakeholders in the industry effectively so that we can take responsibility for the waste we produce.” The collective consists of more than 130 member companies from all parts of the beauty value chain. Prominent members of the collective include Sephora and Eastman Chemical, and Pact is working to add more multinational beauty brands this year to further increase the scale of its impact.
I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Davis a few weeks ago to discuss Pact’s origins, goals and early development.
Why Pact Collective? Why now?
Let’s start with a basic understanding of scale here. An estimated 120 billion beauty and health packages are produced every year. That’s a lot of packages, more than 27 per global consumer.
Davis comes from a background in safe ingredients for beauty products. It goes back to his days as organizing director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics from 2007 to 2011. I know anyone, though, that you can start by looking at the chemical hazards of the ingredients and it’s easy to get involved in the snowball. where and how those ingredients are taken, where the waste is in the system and what can be done to improve packaging.
An estimated 120 billion beauty and health packages are produced every year. That’s a lot of packages, more than 27 per global consumer.
“Beauty product packaging is often too small to be captured and counted in a standard material recovery facility [or MRF] equipment,” Davis said. “And surprisingly some of the smaller jars, caps and tubes have resin ID codes or disposal instructions. Without this basic information, customers and hand sorters at facilities like Pact cannot quickly and easily determine what material they are holding.
So, what is needed to increase packaging sustainability in this industry? Pact Collective’s theory of change is based on four key principles.
1. Acquisition
Pact’s founders understood that if there was a one-size-fits-all solution to the beauty product packaging challenge, then the collective wouldn’t need to exist. The key to Pact’s sourcing guide is pretty simple: Choose the best set material for the application and choose the material most likely to be reused or recycled within the set.
2. Design
This (for me) is the real innovation. Pact provides eight suggestions for designers. Some of my favorites:
- Design for reuse
- Reduce the amount of packaging
- Use the highest possible post-consumer recycled content (PCR)
For me, design is the most exciting space we can focus on when it comes to packaging. As architect, designer and author William McDonough often says, “Design is the first signal of human intent.” In general I am not an optimist, but I believe that there are people who are creative enough to design a sustainable future if brands are willing to try new things and experiment.
3. Education
If you’re like me, you start wondering if something can be recycled before you buy it. You look at the thing and say, “Yeah, I’m sure it can be recycled somewhere.” I often make mistakes because of the huge gap between theoretical and practical recycling. Pact is pushing for more transparency in labeling so that users of products don’t have to guess.
One way to improve education, however, is to score better. “Suppliers must produce packaging that is properly labeled and we must immediately stop buying packaging that is not [labeled for recycling],” said Davis. “The idea that it’s ‘too hard’ to put a resin code on a beauty package is too limited, a poor excuse. If we mandate truth in labeling, through regulation and market policies, then we will see packaging suppliers producing materials that can be recycled in MRFs. “
4. End of life
What really happens between our curbsides and the next life of a piece of packaging? For most beauty and health packaging, it’s a landfill or incineration. So, not much of an afterlife at all.
What dictates this? First and foremost, the choice of material. Too much of this packaging uses materials that cannot be recycled or there is no market for recycling. Second is the male. As mentioned earlier, most MRFs have great difficulty separating small packages and keeping them in the recycling flow. That means that even when beauty and health packaging is recyclable and labeled as such, much of it literally falls through the cracks and ends up in landfills, incinerators or (worse) the environment.
The idea that it is ‘too hard’ to put a resin code on a beauty package is very limiting. Bad excuse.
Pact Collective solves this problem to some degree by creating take-back programs and hand-separating materials to determine what’s in the packaging mix. This retrieval, sorting and eventual sale directly to recycling markets will allow Pact members to obtain valuable data as they work to innovate packaging solutions for the future. Hand sorting is obviously not a scalable model in North America due to labor costs, however, so it should be seen as a transitional solution to get us to the next step.
Collectives like this hold the promise for entire industries to become more sustainable if they can engage the entire supply chain and expect real change from their members. I look forward to following Pact as it grows and develops. With any luck, this will create a movement in the beauty industry that will increase circularity and provide a template for other industries to develop as well.
