How To Recycle Your Beauty Products
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that beauty is not a sustainable industry.
I think that there’s a lot that can be done to improve this like using post-consumer waste plastics instead of brand new ones and adding actual expiration dates to products like food (why don’t we do this???) so you’re never left wondering when you got something.
I also think the beauty influencer space could be improved drastically by brands reducing packaging in PR mailers and also ASKING bloggers what they’d like to receive in the mail.
Do you know how many products I have sitting in my apartment right now for people with oily skin and curly hair??
And normally I’d just give them to a friend but as we all know these are not normal times, but that might mean I have a giveaway coming up soon so stay tuned on that.
Anyway, as someone who has tried and somewhat failed to use reusable cotton pads and who is trying to push back on brands when they want to send a boat load of products but making slow progress, I felt like when I came back to New York after a few months away to a cabinet of some expired products that I should at least make a great effort to recycle as many of them that I was able to rather than just tossing them in the trash.
For this post I’m following the recycling guide posted by Versed on their website because it’s easy to follow and understand.
Bottle With Pump:
Rinse out the bottle completely. You can recycle the bottle and discard the pump (the spring inside can’t be recycled).
Bottle with Dropper
Rinse out the bottle completely. You can recycle the bottle and discard the dropper.
Tub
Rinse out the tub and lid completely. You can recycle both the tub and the lid.
Tube
Unscrew the cap and cut a hole in the tube to clean out any excess product. Rinse the tube and recycle that and the cap.
Many products can go in the regular recycling but just make sure you read your town rules about what can and can’t be recycled.
You should get rid of products if you notice that they are breaking up in weird ways, that the color has changed, or if you just know you got it a really long time ago. (One odd thing that ended up being helpful for me was searching my email to see which day an event was where I remembered getting a specific product so if you’re a beauty blogger or editor you actually can remember exactly when you got something!)
Most products have about a 12 month shelf life and you can check them on the back of the packaging to see if you notice an 8m 12m or 24m marker.
One thing that absolutely shocked me when cleaning out products was that Rodial products all seem to have a 6 month shelf life?? Use that Glamolash XXL mascara real quick if you’ve got it.
If that’s the only cream you use I guess I get it but if you’re like me and testing a lot of things at once, it might be helpful to push it to either 8 or 12 months. I definitely need to do some more digging on that.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post about how to recycle the different types of products.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you try this!
yours,
Austen