Recycle More: What You Can – And Can't

We’re used to recycling kitchen waste – great job on properly disposing of that milk carton – but when it comes to beauty product packaging, things aren’t as straightforward.

Some 120 billion. That’s the number of units of packaging produced yearly by the global cosmetics industry – according to Zero Waste Week, an annual waste awareness campaign held in Britain every September for landfill reduction. As for the cardboard packaging that you discard after extracting a new beauty buy? They say that’s a loss of 18 million acres of forest each year.

These are big, unfathomable numbers. They are also numbers that anyone who has ever bought a moisturiser, shampoo or lipstick has contributed to. And the answer to combating unnecessary waste doesn’t lie in just recycling. It lies in informed recycling.