WWD: The Beauty of Recycling
According to Zero Waste Week, an annual awareness campaign in the U.K., the cosmetics industry produces a staggering 120 billion units of plastic-containing packaging each year.
While demand for sustainable solutions among beauty consumers have never been higher, most empty makeup containers are still very difficult to recycle or can’t be recycled altogether due to the multi-part or multi-material nature of cosmetics products.
Impatient for the system to evolve, M·A·C Cosmetics created Back-to- M·A·C – a pioneer take-back program intended to reduce the environmental impact of its packaging by recycling or recovering as much of its plastic packaging as possible. The program today looks very similar to when it was first created 30 years ago in Canada, where the brand was born. People simply return their clean, empty products to a participating M·A·C counter to be recycled; what cannot be recycled is converted into energy.
