How can I make my beauty routine more eco-friendly?

Sustainability experts share tips for minimizing your makeup bag’s environmental impact

“I’m a huge beauty lover but I become riddled with guilt when I think of all the waste my routine is generating. I want to be more sustainable, but I also don’t want to compromise on results. Is there any way to have my cake and eat it too?”

From the antioxidant moisturizer that gives my skin a glow to the lash-enhancing serum I can’t quite quit, there’s plenty about my beauty routine that makes me feel good. But as a nature enthusiast who loathes the idea of creating waste, it’s not lost on me that the modernday consumption of beauty products and the industry that churns them out at breakneck speed aren’t doing our planet any favours.

Everything that goes into making a product and getting it to your top shelf, whether it’s the farming and harvesting of ingredients or the packaging and shipping, takes an environmental toll. And the actions you take when that bottle or tube is empty and needs to be disposed of leave a lasting impact, too. Sending something to the landfill should be a last resort.

It’s clear that the beauty industry needs to do better at being less wasteful. But I feel mildly optimistic that things are going in the right direction. Brands big and small are making headway with eco-minded packaging, and becoming more transparent about practices such as supporting fair-trade agriculture.

As a consumer, mindful choices help me feel like I’m pitching in to minimize my footprint. There are two key areas where I feel this is most impactful. First, there’s the before stage, i.e. when looking for a product to add to a routine. And then there’s the after, or what is done with a product once it’s finished.

Plastic-free packaging is ideal, though options are limited. An excellent one is the 19-piece solid skincare line from Oceanly, by Montreal-based Attitude (you might be familiar with their cleaning products), housed in biodegradable cardboard tubes. The formulas I’ve tried so far feel totally luxe.

Anything in aluminum is also a win, like Weleda’s newly launched Skin Food Face Care Nourishing Oil-to-Milk Cleanser and the tubes of water-less body and hair care concentrates from Everist, a Canadian line. “We love aluminum as it’s infinitely recyclable, lightweight and shower friendly—it doesn’t rust!” says co-founder Jessica Stevenson. Everist recently swapped virgin aluminum for the recycled kind in its packaging. “By switching to 100 per cent recycled aluminum tubes, we were able to reduce our tube’s carbon footprint by an additional 70 per cent.”

As well, beauty is entering its refillable era. While brands such as The Body Shop and Kjaer Weis have been doing this for many years, there’s been a steady uptick in brands such as Caudalie and Armani Beauty adopting refillable packaging. The most promising sign is that refills are popping up in all types of product categories, from skin and hair care to makeup and fragrance, and players at both the luxury and mass levels are testing the waters. That translates into a growing list of options for all budgets and beauty needs.

Refills aren’t a perfect solution by any means. because you’re still buying a recycled plastic cartridge or capsule of product to top up the original container, but they do significantly minimize plastic consumption and reduce landfill waste.

Let’s move on to what to do once you’ve used a product up. “Not recy- cling and allowing otherwise usable materials to become waste is just that — a waste,” says Gina Herrera, senior director of brand partnerships at TerraCycle, which offers recycling programs for hard-to-recycle packaging. “Since the major- ity of an average product’s environ- mental impact comes from the ex- tracting and refining phase of pro- duction, replacing the virgin material used to create new prod- ucts with recycled material has a significant impact on both the envi- ronment and landfills.”

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as tossing a bottle of serum or a tube of mascara in the blue bin and patting yourself on the back. “The more materials like plastics, glass and metals that make up your beauty product’s packaging, the lesser chance it is recyclable curb-side in your blue bin,” says Herrera. “This waste can be too costly, in regard to both time and money, to separate and process from the perspective of your town’s recycling program.”

DIY-ing it by taking a product apart at home doesn’t solve the issue. “Even if you went as far as to manually separate your product’s glass, paper and metal components for recycling, the remaining plastic trigger heads, pumps and product tubes are still not accepted by many municipal recycling programs,” Herrera says.

It’s not that recycling beauty pack- aging is impossible; it’s just not seamlessly built into our everyday systems. You can learn more about which recyclables are accepted near you at recyclecoach.com and how2recycle.info.

It’s worth looking into brand pro- grams like Back-to-M.A.C, a take- back initiative launched by M.A.C Cosmetics over 30 years ago to re- cycle empties that you drop off in store. This year, along with donat- ing $100,000 to Plastics for Change, M.A.C will partner with Close the Loop in the U.S. and Canada and expects to collect 150,000 to 200,000 kg of cosmetic packaging.

Working with a wide range of brands, including L’Oréal Paris, Burt’s Bees, L’Occitane and Weleda, TerraCycle offers similar services through various mail-in programs. And if you have a local Holts, you can drop off empty beauty products in store through the Holt Renfrew Free Beauty Recycling Program backed by TerraCycle.

You need to prep these empties before recycling so they can suc- cessfully cross over into a new life. “Make a habit of rinsing out fin- ished products,” says Herrera.

“The presence of any residual product may not only relegate that specific product to a landfill, but it can also contaminate additional, otherwise recyclable material, in the process.”

The ultimate eco-friendly move is of course buying less. “Less is more,” says Jenkins, who recommends multi-tasking products like face oils that can also be used on hair or cuticles.

“The old saying we learned as school children, ‘reduce, reuse, and recycle,’ is just as relevant now,” says Hererra. “The most environ- mentally conscious decision is al- ways to reduce your overall con- sumption and buy less when pos- sible, but when you absolutely need to purchase new beauty products, try to find reusable and refillable options.”

A sense of restraint can have a lasting result for yourself — less clutter, more thoughtfully designed products — and for Mother Nature. ASK THE KIT IS THE REAL-TALK ADVICE COLUMN YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED. EVERY MONTH, WRITER