CTPA urges beauty industry to cease packaging waste
By Rebecca Hitchon | 23 November 2021 | Feature, Movers & Shakers, News, Sustainability & the environment
The Cosmetic, Toiletry and Perfumery Association (CTPA) has issued a call to action for the beauty industry to end packaging waste from cosmetic products.
In a stakeholder roundtable held by the organisation, it was concluded that the industry’s ultimate goal should be to cease packaging waste, with mainstream refill and reuse programmes being pushed to reduce waste from beauty businesses.
The CTPA commented that these models, which include take-back schemes and dedicated collection points, should exist on a larger, industry-wide scale to increase awareness and recover more packaging.
“As an industry we have to recognise that a lot of our packaging is not recycled, so the onus is on us to be responsible and develop solutions to reduce the amount of waste,” said director-general of the CTPA, Emma Meredith.
“Take-back schemes could be a major step in helping to achieve this and there was huge appetite at the roundtable to drive this forward.”
Attendees of the discussion included representatives from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the charity WRAP UK which promotes sustainable resource use, OPRL whose mission is to deliver a consistent, UK-wide recycling message on brand packaging, the Flexible Plastic Fund which gives value to flexible plastics so they are properly recycled, and recycling company TerraCycle.
In light of the conclusions made at the roundtable, the CTPA has teamed up with WRAP to add information on how to recycle cosmetic packaging onto its digital Recycling Locator tool, which locates nearby recycling stations for the public to dispose of their beauty items.
It is hoped the partnership will mean that more cosmetics brands encourage their customers to get involved with recycling beauty items and more currently non-recycled cosmetic packaging will be recycled.
“For citizens any recycling scheme needs to be easy-to-use, they need to be motivated to use it and they need to know where to recycle. We are very pleased to be supporting citizens to do this through our Recycling Locator and working with the CTPA to increase awareness of the tack-back schemes currently available,” commented head of citizen behaviour change at WRAP, Sarah Clayton.