How to recycle metals from your nail business
By Green Salon Collective | 28 June 2022 | Expert Advice, Feature, Sustainability & the environment
Green Salon Collective (GSC) 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 details how to ensure your business’ metal waste is properly recycled – and why it’s crucial that you do so.
Your nail business likely disposes of a great deal of metal, especially aluminium. A large proportion of this will be from foil wraps, and your business may even be a dumping ground for empty drinks cans or food tins.
Why is it important to recycle metals?
It is extremely costly to extract metal from the earth; costly in terms of financing, but also the impact on our planet and often on people (think of mining conditions in parts of Africa or South America). Virgin aluminium, for example, requires mining bauxite ore, which undergoes energy-intensive processing.
It is widely cited that recycling aluminium uses at least 90% less energy than primary production. Combine that with eliminating the need for mining and it becomes apparent that recycling is an imperative. The difference in processing recycled as opposed to virgin aluminium can be equivalent to powering the average UK home.
Contamination is a common barrier for hair and beauty businesses to recycle metals. Often, recycling service providers collect metals with plastics and glass. If used and thus contaminated foil is put with this collection, it may spoil the chances of some of those materials getting recycled. Because few waste disposal services collect metals separately, salons find they have little choice than to discard their contaminated metals with the rest of their rubbish.
Responsible disposal solutions
When businesses use Green Salon Collective to dispose of their metal waste, they can be assured that it will be recycled. We provide bins with which to separate metals from all other waste streams. This ensures that contaminants on the metals do not leach onto other materials, which would likely render them non-recyclable.
GSC makes use of the infrastructure of a third-party local business, First Mile, to transport metal waste from salons to a sorting facility. We have worked out a system so that this metal is kept separate from everything else and is regularly weighed. We have done this so our members can see the collective impact of our efforts in reclaiming this valuable resource.
In our short history as a business, we have already diverted thousands of kilos of metal from ending up in landfill.
From our launch in July 2020 to December 2020, we collected over 1.5 tonnes of aluminium.
That is an incredibly large amount of pure aluminium from a limited number of businesses in such a short time, and we know from our partnership with First Mile that this metal was used in the UK to make engine parts. All profits generated from recycling salon metal waste are donated to our affiliate charities, too.
If we collect enough aluminium from our members, we may be able to supply this material directly to producers of products like foil wraps. This would mean we have collectively closed the loop on this material for our industry. These are the sorts of projects we will be able to lead when we help yet more hair and beauty businesses to responsibly dispose of their waste.
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.