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Unlike food products, bathroom and cosmetic products frequently do not contain any recycling instructions on their packaging. Instead, they contain a series of seemingly mysterious symbols requiring its users to imply some induction and guesstimation.
Apart from being notoriously difficult to recycle, cosmetic items often contain remnants of residual products plus being assembled with mixed materials rendering the recycling process tedious. While the basic rule remains – check with your local council to see if they are recyclable, the general impression one gets is that most councils do not accept cosmetic jars, tubes or containers.
So what are our options? Landfill or perhaps go permanently make-up or skincare-free? Well, all hope is not lost. Some cosmetic brands and shops offer in-store drop-off services such as MAC, Priceline, Myers, David Jones to name a few, while online eco-home and beauty store Sassy Organics offers a mail-back recycling service where recyclers need only to collect items that are not usually recyclable in the council system, mail these items to them and receive a $10 store credit sent to their account, more details here.
Need a more convenient recycling drop-off point? Terracycle is the big name in this arena and offers a range of recycling programmes and drop-off points ranging from Rip Curl Wetsuit recycling to BIC pens to Dish and Air care. You can use its public drop-off point location to see what can be recycled in your neighbourhood. I did a couple of quick scans, and it seems that your recycling chances are probably higher if you live in a metro city. However, you can opt to become a public collection point to support your local community to avoid their landfill contributions here. Alternatively, there is also a mail-back option with Terracycle known as the Zero Waste Box, but these are costly. Although they may be sustainable if your organisation, community or workplace are able to support this initiative. These boxes collect a variety of objects such as Personal Protective Equipment, which has been widely used in the face of the recent and ongoing pandemic/endemic, face masks and office stationery among others.
So what do those cryptic symbols on your cosmetic jars and bottles mean?
Image credits to deboratentis.com
Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed fantasising the plot of Da Vinci Code made flesh in the form of tiny Olay day moisturisers, these symbols tell little in terms of how recyclable they are in the Australian context. The commonly seen ‘tiny open jar’ symbol that usually comes with a numeric connotation refers to the product’s Period after open; for example, if it says 35m in the tiny jar, that means the product is usable for 35 months once opened. However, this is sometimes accompanied with the Half-filled Hourglass symbol that describes a product’s best before date.
That Green Dot with the yin-yang arrows: this European-derived symbol signifies that the company has paid a recycling corporation to be in-charge of its ecological waste management.
Finally, the ever-confusing Recycling Mobius triangle, while this symbol indicates that the product is recyclable, its recyclability is not applicable to the Australian context where only the ARL is encouraged to be followed. Read more about Recycling Myths here.
Whilst there are recycling options out there, one can’t help but realized that perhaps, the best solution is to reduce the waste that we generate.
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