How to minimise plastic waste in your nail business

Green Salon Collective was founded in 2020 by environmental experts, campaigners and beauty professionals, with an aim to help member salons in the UK and Ireland to responsibly dispose of their waste. In this blog, the Collective explains how to reduce the amount of plastic waste generated by your business.

Plastic is both lightweight and extremely durable, making it the perfect material for all sorts of products and packaging. How this material benefits society is exactly how it is an inherent threat to the environment. Its durability means that it takes an incredibly long time to degrade and seeing that we have been producing plastic since the beginning of the twentieth century, our planet is drowning in the stuff.

Plastic itself is not the underlying problem; our exploitation of the material is the real issue. We manufacture something that is near indestructible but often employ it to be used just once. On top of that, separation and sorting have become minefields.

This is because there are so many types of plastic, which are often mixed with or physically attached to other types of material. But the scariest bit is that, in most cases, the cost of collection and recycling of this material is not put on those who produce it. That cost goes to you – consumers (via taxes) and business owners (via waste charges).

Consider what might happen if producers footed most of the bill for collection, sorting and recycling, or even paid for the whole headache. They’d probably look at their bottom line and think ‘this is getting expensive’, and possibly find a way to overcome the cost by redesigning their packaging so that it can be composted or easily and cheaply dealt with by local authorities.

Your salon likely has a substantial plastic footprint. To provide your services you need industry-specific products that tend to come in plastic packaging. You may also be a dumping ground for takeaway cups with plastic lids, personal protective equipment (PPE) and other plastic things.

Let’s look at a couple of alternative materials…

Glass

In the past, beauty brands have conducted a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their product packaging. They frequently came to the same conclusion: plastic is better. This is partly to do with the amount of energy that is required to produce glass, which is much higher than that for plastic. Although plastic is typically made from fossil fuels such as petroleum, the high energy demands required for manufacturing glass are most often being met by fossil fuels such as natural gas.

Also, the fact that glass is significantly heavier than plastic means that transporting it requires much more fuel. But glass isn’t all bad. Recycled glass uses less energy and oil for its production, also releasing less pollutants, and the material, unlike plastic and paper, can be infinitely recycled without impacting on quality.

Here’s what to take away from this: glass is not always the better option, but products that are housed in recycled glass bottles that are then recycled after use are an acceptable plastic alternative.

Paper

For things like bags, paper is not always better as the resource footprint for paper compared to plastic is much higher. Global paper production is a large driver for deforestation so it is incredibly important to look for labels such as Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Take a look at our previous blog: How your beauty business can help stop deforestation

What other approaches are there?

Bulk

Products that come in larger quantities reduce the packaging to product ratio. In other words, a 10L container of product uses less plastic for packaging than the same amount of product contained within 40 250mL bottles. As a bonus, bulk is often cheaper!

Refills

There are many refills schemes now available around the world and these eliminate the need for single-use plastic. You can find refills for all sorts of products – from dry food to cleaning products and of course, beauty products. These are often sold in dedicated zero waste or refills shops, but more and more businesses have refill stations to augment their offerings.

Recycling

It is important to start by trying to reduce and reuse plastic consumption before looking for ways to recycle it. That said, purchasing products made with recycled plastic is not a bad thing, especially when these are recycled again – or better yet, used again.

Some plastics are highly recyclable and have high recovery rates, while others are recyclable but recovery rates are lower. Some can be toxic to human health, yet others are a nightmare to collect, transport and recycle. To learn more about each of the seven plastic types, click here.

Recycle Now is a tool for understanding how to recycle items by material and location. This is especially useful for plastics as there are so many types.

Visit Green Salon Collective’s website, Facebook and Instagram accounts and learn about the solutions it offers for your beauty business.

This was written for Green Salon Collective by MeetthefiveRs.