EP203. Turning the tide on plastic in beauty

I read a report by Greenpeace the other day which said that Unilever, you know, the second biggest global personal care brand, is the biggest corporate seller of plastic sachets in the world and was predicted to sell 53 billion. That's billion with A B plastic sachets in 2023. That's 1,700 plastic sachets every single second. Isn't that just hideous? I can't imagine what 53 billion sachets would look like, but I bet it is monstrous to look at. And it's not just Unilever doing this, of course, because we are simply drowning in plastic on planet Earth. And if we want to make it specific to cosmetics, around 70% of the beauty industry's waste comes from packaging, according to the British Beauty Council. And most of that isn't recycled. So I think we can all agree that urgent change is needed. Now, I've interviewed many change makers on this podcast to date and I feel relieved that we have wonderful people like many of my guests out there in the world trying to make a difference. And today's guest is no different as I'm speaking with Joel Tasha of Clean Hub, a visionary leader and a visionary organization with a mission of preventing plastic waste from entering our environment in the first place. As Joel says, life is best lived on a clean planet. And I couldn't agree more. So do you want to hear how one team has collected over 7 million verified kilograms of waste to date? Settle in for another great episode. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make or sell your green beauty formulations. In my weekly episodes, I explore the sustainability of the beauty industry and encourage you to join me in changing the industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmeyer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have thousands and thousands of students in over 190 countries around the world. You study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. So in today's episode I'm joined by Joel Tasha, the founder and co CEO of Clean Hub. Joel grew up sailing and surfing and developed a passion for all all ocean related topics. So to then turn his passion into a career, he started Clean Hub, a company committed to freeing the planet from plastic pollution. Clean Hub's solution enables proactive brands to fund and advance plastic recovery in coastal communities across Asia and Africa, where there is the greatest risk of plastic entering the ocean, whilst their AI technology is used to track and trace that collection. Now, unlike alternative approaches that are focused on recovering plastic once it's already in nature, CleanHub is instead stopping it from getting there in the first place. Hi, Joel, how are you doing today?

I'm great, thanks. And thanks a lot for having me.

Oh, I am really interested that you're here. I'm thrilled that you're here because I think this is going to be a really interesting topic. So let's talk about the organization you run. What is CleanHub and what do you.

Do in cleanup's core? Our goal is to bring waste management infrastructure where there's currently none, because I think everybody knows about the topic of plastic pollution. Very few look then actually what's happening that plastic pollution can actually occur and how we can solve that problem. And one very important aspect, obviously, besides producing better packaging, is then also the waste management aspect. Because in the end, I think we all want the circular economy. We all want things to be reused and also material to be reused and recycled. But that will not work if we don't collect it. And Today there's roughly 2 billion people in the world who do not enjoy the luxury of waste management. So they don't have that little bin in the backyard where people will come to pick up the trash they have. And this needs to happen if you want to stop plastic pollution.

So what do you do with Clean Hub for that?

We partner up with brands. More specifically consumer good brands, and even more specifically, a lot of cosmetics brands are partnered up with us. So roughly 40% of our customer base is coming from the wider field of cosmetics. It can be sunscreen, skincare products, beauty products. That's what we cluster under cosmetics. They set a portion of their revenue aside to collect either as much plastic as they produce, if they produce. But at the same time, we also have roughly 37% of our customers that don't even have plastic anymore in their products that still set aside portion of their revenue to then pay for waste management. On the other side of the world, we find local organizations in countries like India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Tanzania who want to run a waste management business or are already actively running a waste management business. And we provide funding to them to expand the collection to reach more households and to bring waste management to those 2 billion people who currently live lack it. That's the one activity. So raising the funds, finding the partners, making sure that the waste is being collected. And then on top of that, I'm quite a critical consumer myself. I don't believe in a lot of claims. When we started the company, we said, okay, we want to back every claim that we make. So we started building a track and trace software, which all the waste management partners have to use to actually record the volumes and deliver evidence to our technology that they actually collect the waste. So if we say we're going to collect 10 tons of plastic waste, we actually also have the evidence, by the way, publicly available, that these 10 tons of plastic are actually being collected.

Wow. So why did you start Clean Hub? What was the big driver for you?

I know this is mostly an audio podcast, but for somebody who sees that video, they might not believe it. I used to be a surfer. I still am. Whenever I go on vacation, I love the ocean. I love being outdoors. I grew up at Lake Constance, which is in southern Germany, right next to the Alps. So I spent my entire childhood outside. And it's a beautiful area. And later in life, I started traveling. Right. I've been to places like Indonesia, Bali. I've been to Senegal. I was very lucky to see a lot of beautiful places in the world. And the one thing that you also always see is there's pollution there. People are burning their trash in the evening. It's affecting their lives in a big way, way bigger than me. But also there's a lot of plastic entering the ocean. So if you do go surfing, you will touch a plastic bag, you. You will encounter plastic pollution wherever you go. And that was a topic that really annoyed me because in the end, I believe maybe one of the few universal truths there are that life is best lived on a clean planet. It doesn't matter if it's me living in Berlin or if it's a fisherman in Senegal. It's just a much, much nicer life. If you're not living surrounded by pollution, it goes for all the fishes or the turtles in the ocean that don't want to eat plastic. That's the core belief that the business was founded on.

And I think we can all get on board with that core belief that is incredibly important. So tell me more about how these partners work. I've seen on your website that you particularly work with India, Indonesia, Tanzania, Cambodia. How do these partners over there collect plastic from the environment?

It depends a little bit. And I'm always careful to say that it's only collected from the environment because that's only half of the story. We do collect from the environment in some areas, right through cleanups, etc. But the important thing is for us, that plastic doesn't even get into the environment in the first place, which means it should be collected post consumption. Somebody should have a bin in their backyard, put the plastic in there, separate it from the organic trash so that the organic trash can actually decompose and be soil again. The plastic can be sorted so that the recyclable part can be recycled and the non recyclable part can be safely disposed. That's the important thing that needs to happen. And then on top of that, plastic and waste management in general is a very cultural topic, even within Germany. I'm in Berlin. If I go to Munich or to Bavaria, a different federal state, they will have a slightly different waste management system than we in Berlin. If I go to London, it will look different than here in Berlin. It's the same thing in the countries where we're active. In most of the cases we try to push for household collection so that somebody goes to the door, receives the waste, puts it on a truck, it goes into a sorting center and there it's being sorted. In other areas it's a little more passive collection. So there will be one collection spot where then the villagers can bring their waste on a specific day and it will be received there and from there it will be sorted. So this is one part that the partners actually do on the ground. They are responsible for the collection in whatever way it happens locally. And then they are also responsible for sorting the waste. So making sure that all the pet plastic bottles go into the one bale and are sold into recycling. Metals are sorted out, paper is sorted out, cardboard is sorted out, and also the non recyclable pieces are sorted out and then that material is being disposed of. They're responsible for the logistics of it. Yeah, Running a compliant organization and this is one big piece where we also help, especially from the social standards, et cetera. So they the partner on the ground there, therefore the entire operation of the waste management business.

Amazing. So it sounds like the money that comes into Clean Hub from the brands that you work with, and we'll come to them in a minute, that then goes to creating this waste infrastructure or this recycling infrastructure in various countries around the world. Have I summarized that correctly?

That's correct, yeah.

Okay, so why focus then on the beauty industry in particular? Because you said, I think 40% of the companies you work with are currently in cosmetics. I'm not entirely surprised. But why beauty?

We don't discriminate against any industry we'd love to have. I don't think that beauty is the biggest polluter out there. Food and beverage, for example, they are polluting way more. They have worse packaging than the beauty industry. But to be honest, I think beauty is also very brand driven and the consumers are very conscious about the impact of the purchases they make and they are looking for brands that are doing more. So that's one very particular piece. And also we see that the industries that struggle to find alternative solutions to reduce their packaging end up with us. Because it's very, very difficult in certain industries to actually move away from plastic as a packaging.

Right.

As soon as you have anything that is in liquid form, paper and cardboard becomes a very, very difficult to use packaging material. Glass is quite heavy in transportation. If you want to recycle glass, it's. It requires a lot of energy. So a lot of companies that actually look at the overall emissions of their packaging will end up using plastic because it's also the one that has the lowest environmental impact. So they can't move away from plastic. And at the same time they are also seeing that plastic can cause pollution if it's not managed appropriately.

Right.

And this is where they then say, okay, we can't move away from it. We know this is a problem, but we want to also be part of the solution. And this is when they then and partner up with us as kind of the second best solution compared to actually reducing plastic.

I understand. It's interesting to hear that so much of it is brand driven as well. It doesn't entirely surprise me saying that the beauty industry has some sizable impacts on the environment as well, from your perspective, because I know that you've put some blog posts on your website about this or your team has. Anyway, can you run us through what sort of impacts you think the beauty industry has, particularly with respect to waste.

That is very clearly out There, is that 120 billion units of packaging are sold by the cosmetics industry every year. As probably the listeners know, there's multiple different packaging options used in cosmetics. And some of them are better and some of them are worse. You have the very solid plastic, big shipping containers, but the actual horrible piece are the multi layer, these small sachets that you give out sometimes even as a trial. Yeah, you can't recycle them. It's pure waste. I would actually be interested in a study of how many of those actually go straight into the bin, including the product inside. It's a massive waste and Then you have the entire topic of microplastics that are within cosmetics as well. Right. I think this is exactly where the education that you're doing is playing a massive role in phasing that out. And more and more brands are doing that. And then at the end of it, roughly 95% of cosmetic packaging is just thrown away at the end of use. Right. So this gives us a bit of an overview of the scale. At the same time, especially in shampoo, etc. We see that quite a lot of plastics can be recycled because they use mono material, like for example, hdpe. But then you have a lot of special packaging or when you have these pumps out of plastic, these are incredibly difficult to recycle and also incredibly difficult to make from recycled plastic, which, for example, if you go to brands like an airsop and you buy the refill container, it might look exactly the same. But the big difference is they don't have the pump in the refill container where you reuse the pumping system. And this is the difficult part to recycle. So there's a lot of these tiny challenges that brands have to overcome, but the scale of it is insane.

It is. The scale of the beauty industry in itself is insane. So I completely agree. Okay, let me, let me ask the tricky question, which I'm sure you know is coming. You create this waste infrastructure abroad, which is funded through the products that are sold by brands that work with you. And from what I've seen on your website, you allow brands to then call themselves plastic neutral. Now we know neutrality is nowhere near sufficient. Your website very correctly states that we're suffocating our environment in plastics. So is clean hub allowing brands to pay to pollute?

I wouldn't put it that way. Everything aside, if you put cleanup aside, if you put really everything aside, the concept of neutrality is 1 minus 1 equals 0. Now, that in itself already is a bit of a problem if they would be real, because we already polluted for 70 years annually, we pump out 400 million tons of plastic, which is building massive mountains of trash. So we should more be looking towards a 1 minus 2 equals minus 1, that we actually also have a downward trending curve. That's the first thing. Then what also happened is the entire carbon market where it turned out that carbon neutrality in fact is not 1 minus 1 equals 0, but it's more 1 minus 0.001 equals 0.99997. So nothing happens and it was a false claim. These are, I think, the two main criticisms that are out there. Plus the fact that obviously you should reduce. That's where everything starts. I think these are the three core things that need to happen. We are currently also reworking the claim. I want to work through these three points now and what cleanup is doing. The first thing that we wanted to make sure is then that one minus one equals zero. And we wanted to prove that. And this is why we have an engineering team of four, actually five people, including a data scientist, that build software to prove that whatever we claim we collect is actually true. That's the first thing. So we want to make sure that we can say, if we say 10 tons are collected, 10 tons are actually collected. No doubt about that. So that's the first core principle. Then we have partners. As I mentioned, 37% of our customers don't even have plastic in their packaging, and they are still collecting plastic. So in theory, they are the ones that are bringing down the trend. And there are customers that are also collecting more than what they produce. That's something that we also actively promote within the partners. But at some point you also need to stay competitive with other brands that are out there. It's like if you spend way more money on being a good citizen and that is not rewarded by the market, then at some point your brand won't exist anymore. That is then also not a great outcome for anyone. These are the points on the reduction piece. I think the big difference, because it's easy that people compare plastic credits to carbon credits, where in carbon the goal is to actually bring down the emissions in total. In cosmetics, I don't see a future where we will have zero packaging. You will always require packaging. It's like, yes, we need reuse systems, but these reuse containers need to be made of some sort of material. And ideally the material that we use is something that is already existing, so it has to come from waste. So we need a circular economy. That's the goal in our industry. We don't need a zero emissions industry. We need an industry where resources are being reused, recycled, and obviously reduced. But I think every listener knows that reducing packaging after a certain point is incredibly difficult. And just thinking logically, from an economic standpoint, having more packaging is not economical because you need to pay for packaging. Everything that you buy is a cost. The market in itself is already incentivized to use less packaging. And this is where it all comes together. So we are all for reduction. We have even our own framework where we do packaging assessment together with an external packaging consultant whom you can just send your packaging. He will Tell you how recyclable it is, how circular it is. He will give you recommendations on how you can further reduce. This is part of our offering and at the same time, we need to make sure that we have the infrastructure in place that can actually collect resources and turn them back to the economy. It's not a silver bullet. That's the problem.

In the end, I wasn't expecting you to have one either. It's an incredibly complex topic, as you say, just tying in with something else that Clean Hub has published. So you published a 2023 consumer clean beauty survey. When this podcast drops, it's 2024. We're right at the end of 2023 recording this, but I read this survey with great interest and we'll link to it in the show notes as well so everyone else can have a look. Now, your survey suggests that people are prepared to spend more on cosmetic products that come in sustainable packaging, which sounds great. Now you've just run me through what sustainable packaging means to Clean Hub. So I guess the question is, do you think consumers really do this when it actually comes out to crunch time and they have to buy something, or do you think they get blinded by, particularly with cosmetics, the beauty of the luxurious packaging in multiple boxes?

It's an interesting point that we also heavily discussed internally. As I told you, I'm a skeptic myself. Yes, I think there's a big, big difference between what people say and what people actually do. So I agree with you. There's no proof in the pudding that people will in the end pay more for it. At the same time, it's a bit of an older study that's from the NYU Stern, so the New York University of their sustainability center that found that sustainably marketed products grow as a category 7.1 times faster than the rest of the market, which is quite significant. Be more right. Another problem in my eyes comes in. It says sustainably marketed. It doesn't say that this is actually the better product. So what needs to happen is that it's way easier for the consumer to understand what is actually good packaging, what is a circular packaging and whatever claims a brand makes. How truthful is that? This is again where we say with the data collection that we do, with all the evidence collection plus third party verification, so cleanup is third party verified against ISO standards, how can we make sure that the claims that are made towards the consumer are true? And it's not just marketing, but there's actual real impact going on behind the scenes.

Yes. And this is obviously where the verification model that you've built into Clean Hub. I completely understand where you're coming from. I too am skeptical. So another point on the survey then tying in with that is you asked consumers to rank the most important factors when purchasing products and they ranked for beauty, non toxic and cruelty free as number one and two. Now, arguably those two factors don't have an awful lot to do with sustainability and they're more focused on ethics. Zero waste, for instance, was ranked at number five. Environmental impact was ranked at number six. So do you think people confuse this concept of sustainability and what's natural or ethical?

I think it's a very holistic topic. Right. For me, if I would say I buy cosmetics and I read non toxic and that is probably quite important. I think about myself first. I say I don't want to put anything toxic in my face. That is insane. Same goes for cruelty free. It's like I have a dog, I love animals. Actually I have a beagle who are known to be testing animals. So again, I don't want to be associated to the horrors of that. Plus I want to feel good in the end about the purchase decision that I make. And I think more and more people are waking up to that fact and are asking more questions because information is more readily available. And I think it's 100% sure that people want to buy better, they want to buy better products, they want to buy more sustainable. But and this is the interesting part, it's like nobody really truly wants to change their behavior. This is what we see for example, with refill models. There's so many and big chains that tried refill stations, we can't get people to change their behavior, to actually bring back the container to do the refill because it is painful, it's less convenient. And in my eyes, actually the opportunity for brands to build something with that in mind, that people want to buy better, but they want to buy at the same convenience level and then find solutions around it. I don't know yet how the perfect solution would look like because obviously there would be very successful brand out there. But this is something to be considered because again, it goes back to your initial question. People say they are willing to pay more. People probably also say it's like I'm willing to do refill. What they do in the day to day might look completely different.

No, I agree with you. It's a tough one. I've covered this quite a lot on the podcast here as well, looking at refill models and whether people are ready for it. And some of the pilot schemes that I've interviewed people on seem to be doing really well. But I always think that the people who take part in those pilot schemes are self selecting. And the real sort of test will be when we roll it out to the rest of the population.

And that's the crucial piece, right? It's not enough. Obviously it's great. If 1% of the population changes, that's better than zero. And this is a great, great starting point why we need mass adoption, right? And this is so, so important. And I think putting that back into the context of cleanup, right, it's like I'm not saying that we ourselves will solve plastic pollution, but what we're showing is if we start to dedicate resources from the profits that companies make towards the big problems, waste management is very possible. And it doesn't matter where you go. We have projects in the Andaman Islands, which are some of the remotest islands out there, and it suddenly works if you put in the right incentives. If you make it an economic activity to manage waste, it will be managed. We proved it in more metropolitan areas where people say, oh, it's so difficult regarding logistics and having people change. It works there as well. And it works in different countries, it works in different continents. Even so, we may not get discouraged by the fact that it's difficult and we need to start working and also accept certain imperfections, but keep innovating, keep working on it. Again. If this podcast drops, COP28 will already be closed for a long time. But it's not looking great what's happening there. And if we put our trust in the big political show and into, into behavior change.

Yeah, I know, I know, it's a really tough one. We're going to have to do it ourselves. And I think that's also very much the message that many of my listeners feel as well. So just one final question. How many brands have you currently got working with you at clean hub now?

300. 3305. Yes.

Excellent, excellent. And I'm sure the adoption will be great on that. So my final, final question then is where can people learn more about you and cleanup and if they have a brand and they want to come and work with you, how does that all work?

If you want to follow our journey, Obviously the Socials TikTok is live and then you can follow us on Instagram leanhub IO you can check out our website. If you go to cleanup.com you will also find our brand directory. This is where you can discover all the brands that already work with cleanup where you know if you purchase from them, part of the revenue or part of your purchase will go towards plastic collection. If there's brands that want to start working with us also go to cleanup.com there's a specific section you can just reach out. Schedule a call with our team. We will look at the options together. Again, we have the packaging assessment as well. So if you're interested in changing your packaging, there's the guy that we're working with has more than 15 years experience in optimizing packaging for small companies all the way up to some of the largest brands out there.

Excellent. We will include all of those links with the show notes, so do go and check out CleanHubJol. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Likewise. Thank you so much.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. How can we build the infrastructure that we need everywhere around the world to deal with plastic waste? How can the beauty industry do more? Tell me what you think. Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we've covered, please do delve back into the podcast archives. Go and listen to episode 111, 111, in which I interviewed Mia Davis, who previously used to work for Credo Beauty, and we talked about the sustainability of samples. We touched on plastics and sachets in that interview as well. Or episode 125 in which I spoke with Jo Chidley of Beauty Kitchen and Re, who's pioneering a refill scheme throughout the UK and is doing amazing work. Or episode 145 in which I interviewed Candice Joney about the nine boundaries of planetary care and how we can all become beauty activists. There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Joel and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to our podcasts on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is, and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn we are everywhere and come and give me a Follow Lorraine Dallmeyer on Instagram, visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.