EP118. Plastic is not the enemy - we are

I've just finished recording an episode with Peter Wang Yemdahl of Repurpose Global in which we discussed the global plastic pollution problem and how they're helping brands offset their plastic footprint. And by the time this recording goes live, you'll already have listened to our discussion in your favorite podcast app, because it was released last week. Now, as you'll have heard in the interview, I do struggle a bit with the idea that a brand can effectively pay an organization to remove plastic from the environment, only then to produce new plastic to match that offset. But Repurposed Global are clearly doing very important work, and Peter made the very valid point that sustainability is a journey, not a destination. But it all boils down to the question we tackled right at the end of the interview. Can the beauty industry go plastic free? Or indeed, as Peter put it to me, should the beauty industry go plastic free? This is my final episode for plastic free, July 2022. So that's the topic I want to explore today in my green beauty opinion. Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my green beauty opinions in which I share my takeaways from the podcast interview we released last week and set you a challenge to make the green beauty sector a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. Think about how much plastic is used in the packaging for your beauty products. It's enormous. Now, there are many different figures online and not all of them seem to be accurately sourced. But. But the general consensus is that the personal care industry creates close to 100 billion units of plastic packaging per year. 100 billion. Just let that figure sink in for a minute. There are close to 8 billion people on Earth, so that means that each year, as an industry, we produce 12 and a half pieces of plastic packaging per person just for the personal care industry. So it's all very nice that I'm talking to you about plastic free, July, but we also need an element of realism in the conversation here. Can the beauty industry even go plastic free? My goodness, wouldn't that be incredible? But is it even achievable? Well, not in my lifetime. I would say when every single element of our personal care comes in a plastic container or a wrapper of some form of plastic, and we're clearly producing tens of billions of cosmetics and personal care products per year, you can see how much of an undertaking it would be to completely change that and to move away from plastic completely. Everyone on planet Earth would have to change their personal care buying routines. And as we know, we are creatures of habit and we struggle with change. So this is going to be a slow and painful process. Even last week I was staggered. I met someone who I watched quite happily throw five plastic containers, one aluminium can and a collection of card board into a bin destined for landfill. Now, I immediately fished them out and washed them and then found the relevant recycling bins. But if even basic recycling eludes some people, how do we change everyone's habits to move away from a material that still forms the basis of pretty much all of our consumer habits? So the next question to ask then is should the beauty industry go plastic free? Given that it will be almost impossible to do so, is there perhaps an alternative? After all, plastic itself isn't the enemy, it's an incredible human invention. I just want to stress that point. However, as with most issues to do with sustainability, we simply over consume it and haven't built the infrastructure for handling our plastic waste streams properly. And I keep thinking back to two of the entrepreneurs I recently interviewed on the podcast here, Tammy from Jim and Henry and Tara from Yamya tweet, who clearly use plastic, but do so in a very circular fashion. They send out large containers of their formulations and then receive them back for cleaning and refilling. Again, plastic isn't the enemy here, it's our use of plastic and the waste that we create. So maybe the PC industry doesn't need to go plastic free. Maybe it just needs to embrace circularity a lot more so we're not constantly churning out billions and billions of units of plastic packaging made from virgin materials that may eventually end up in our environment. Just imagine for a minute that all of the plastic used in the beauty industry could either be cleaned and refilled and then used in a circular fashion, or it could be recycled and made from post consumer recycled materials pcr, rather than using virgin plastic. That in itself would be an enormous achievement because it would create far more of a market for plastic waste as well. Which is of course what Peter was talking about. As my recent guest Mia Davis from Credo Beauty very rightly said, we need to talk about waste a lot more. And I think that's my main takeaway from my four podcast episodes for Plastic Free July 2022 while the Beauty industry may never be fully plastic free in its packaging, there is an awful lot this industry could be doing to get itself to a state of responsible plastic production and consumption. So my challenge to you for this week is to look for brands that use post consumer recycled plastic materials in their packaging. Can you find any for plastic free July, Go and ask the beauty brands that you buy from and see what they say. And in the meantime, let's all try to cut down on our plastic consumption, because while we may never be able to fade out its use entirely, we can certainly use a lot less of it. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so in your favorite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.