EP211. Revolutionising Beauty with Upcycled Ingredients

Do you know how many episodes I've released on the topic of upcycling this year alone? I mean, it's only April and this is already the fourth episode I'm putting out about upcycling in 2024. So you can see that this is a topic that I think we should all be talking about because upcycling is exciting. This is part of the reason why I keep coming back to it. As I mentioned in a previous episode, we apparently waste one third of the world's food. 1/3. Just try and picture how much that is. So just imagine how we could use that waste to formulate and package our beauty products. I think upcycling is a huge part of the future of sustainable beauty. Just imagine being able to combine food and cosmetics in such a way that everyone benefits. It's a win win scenario for businesses, for shoppers, and most importantly, for the environment. So today's guest firmly agrees with that statement and runs a company that sells active ingredients, all of which have been upcycled from waste streams. So if you want to hear exactly how one company is turning local waste into ingredients that can go on your face or hair, you're really going to enjoy this 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 who 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 Harry McIlrath, general manager of the Upcycled Beauty Company, which is a raw material manufacturer. They have a vision that one day every beauty and personal care product will be made from upcycled ingredients. Harry has a background in chemistry and is passionate about upcycling and as they mentioned on their website, according to the Circularity gap report, in 2023 the global economy is only 7.2% circular, which is why the upcycled beauty company is growing. The Upcycled Beauty Movement by informing, inspiring and enabling the use of upcycled materials in personal care. Harry and his team are uplifting and shouting about others also working in the circular space, even their competitors, as they believe a global move towards circularity is essential for the future. Hi, Harry, how are you doing today?

Yes, well, thank you.

Lovely to have you here and I'm really interested in what your company does. So let's start at the top. What is the upcycled beauty company? What do you guys do? What do you sell? Tell us everything.

Okay, so the Upcycle Beauty Company has been around technically for three years and we are a raw material manufacturer. And I guess by the name, it kind of suggests that everything we produce is upcycled. So typically we're taking food waste and we're processing that most of it in house. So we're based in the southeast of England, in Kent, and we turn that into cosmetic actives. We're going to talk about a few examples later on.

So paint a picture for me. You say you're processing in house, you must have some fairly sizable facilities, then. What does that look like?

Well, not really, no. So many of the raw materials that we're producing are active ingredients and so that their sort of inclusion levels in finished formulas are relatively small. So we have just received, just bought new equipment. So we have a 1000 litre vessel, a 300 litre vessel, and we have an oil seat press and some other smaller parts as well that allows us to produce everything that we produce. We can use those bioreactors, so we can use them for our fermentation processes, extractions and those sorts of things. So it's relatively simple equipment, but it works for everything that we need it to.

And how many of you are there in the company?

So technically there's three people, so it's a very small team. So we also have a bit of a name quote as well. So there's me, there's Harrison, who is my chap in the office. He does all of the manufacturing and the operations of samples. And then we have Anna, who is our marketing lead, technically based in Germany, and she does most of our sort of sales functions and also our kind of community aspect. So although we're a raw material manufacturer, a large part of what we do is sort of education around upcycling and why we think it's the right way to go.

Well, we're going to talk a bit more about that in a minute. Before we get to that, though, can you tell us a bit about some of the upcycled ingredients that you sell. Is it only upcycled ingredients that you sell? I presume so with the name of the brand. Give us some examples.

Okay. Of course. So yes, everything that we produce is upcycled to release predominant upcycled. So we do use some preservatives. So there's three parts to a portfolio. We have our nectars, which are oil soluble actives. We have raspberry and blueberry nectar which are produced from the leftovers of the juicing industry. So we work closely with a juicing company, a couple of juicing companies in Poland and France. They press juice for beverages. And as everybody expects to be able to have raspberry or blue juice or fruit juices in general throughout the year, they take harvests from both the north and southern hemispheres, so they have availability all year round. And we take the pomace, it's then dried, we separate out the seeds and then we press those for the oil, compress them for the oil. Just to give you sort of a, sort of scale of how much is being taken. For 1 liter of our, sorry, 1 kilogram of our raspberry nectar, it's the oil from 100,000 raspberries. And for blueberry nectar, it's the oil From 800,000 blueberries. So this quite a lot of juice that's required to be pressed so that we can produce our nectars.

Wow, 800,000.

Yes.

What do you say? Blackberries?

Blueberries.

Blueberries. My goodness, that's a huge quantity. So you said one of the three types of ingredients you sell is the nectars. What are the other two?

So we have our tonics which are water soluble active. So we have our gin tonic and barley tonic. So gin and barley are kind of taken from a similar process. So we work with a brewery distillery based about 40 miles away from our offices called Copper Rivet Distillery based in Chatham. They produce beer to produce vodka, which then gets turned into gin. So our gin tonic is taken from the sort of final part of that, but barley tonic is taken from the leftovers of the beer brewing process. When beer is produced, they take barley and that's collected for about 10 to 15 miles away from the kind of a circumference about 10 to 15 miles away from the brewery. That's then milled into the sort of small particles and it's malted. So they spray it with water and allow it to start germinating, then goes into the mash tun where they extract all the sugars. So that's all the sugars that they can get fermented into beer, but the leftover grain, from that, the spent grain, had all the sugars removed. But the level of protein that's in it is actually increasing concentration because of that. And so we take that barley, we put it through an enzymatic process of its fermented and that becomes our barley tonic. So it's concentrated in its level of proteins, sorry, amino acids, peptides, polypeptides, and then gin tonic is a moisturizing active. So that's taken from the leftover wash water. So when the beer is produced, goes into the distillation column to have the alcohol removed to turn into vodka. The leftover liquid there, the water, it can still contain sort of complex carbohydrates, polyphenols, everything that doesn't have a low boiling point, let's say. And that would typically be spread onto farmers fields as fertiliser, but mostly just gets flushed down the drain. The brewery distillery we were working with, or have worked with, they can be producing sort of 10 tonnes a day of that, and because there's so little value to it, it's just typically flushed down the drain.

So that's the nectars, the tonics. What's the third one?

Lastly, in our tonics we have our fiber tonic. So that's our newest hair styling active. So that's taken from the leftovers of hummus production. So when chickpeas boiled for their boiled to produce hummus, the liquid aquafaba, after that process, we process it and that's turned into a hair styling active. We first started working with it, we thought it was going to be very good for conditioning, but actually it's very good for styling as well. And we've seen that, seen that work very well on multiple hair types. So from type 1 all the way up to type 3C, at least we've tried it and I'm sure it won't work on type 4 hair as well. And then lastly, we have our crushes. Crushes are exfoliant particles, so we have those from our raspberry blueberry press cakes. So when the nectar is produced, they get put in through an oil sea press, a cold press which takes the oil out, but then the leftover press cake, we then have milled down into different particle sizes. We have. We also have olive, which is from the olive oil industry, white rice crush from the rice industry. Any broken or misshapen grain particles get broken down or milled into the different particle sizes we have. And then lastly charcoal, which is from the oak fencing industry in the uk. So that's UK grown oak.

Wow. It's absolutely fascinating to hear about how you are taking this waste material and you're turning that into these actives that you can sell to the industry. Just for the listeners. There's lots of people listening who either aspire to have an indie brand or who have an indie brand. What sort of minimum order quantities do you start with?

So technically down to 30 grams. So we have the really small pack sizes on our shop. So we have a Shopify shop, which you can find through our website. And we do already supply quite a large number of those small sample sizes to form the Botanica students already.

Well, we'd love to hear that.

Obviously, this is how companies like Bybee started, because they originally started with our blueberry nectar as their blueberry booster, which.

Is a fantastic formulation because I've tried it many times. Well, let's talk around the conversation around upcycling. It mainly seems to focus on actives. So do you think that is the extent of upcycling that we're seeing at the moment? And do you think it's possible for us to move on to more functional and sort of foundation ingredients in the future?

Absolutely. So it is true that a large proportion of the raw materials that are currently on the market as being upcycled are the actives. I guess that's partly because they're the kind of highest value materials. They're the ones that people talk about. And the nature of actives is that they're the story ingredients as well. But there are other ingredients, other functionalities. So we have. There are emulsifiers. We don't currently sell any or don't produce any. There are emulsifiers such as C Balance from Carbonwave, that was part of the formulation that won the Laura Marshall Award last year at STS Formulate. And there are other emulsifiers as well. There's not a large number of them. That's probably where we are lacking at the moment. There are also some surfactants that could probably be argued as being upcycled. I haven't really looked into them too much, though. I'm trying to think of the name of the companies that makes them. I can't think of them off top of my head. We do have our raw material ingredient directory on the website that has raw materials sorted by their functionalities as well as their upcycling status as well.

Yeah. Which I find fascinating, by the way. I should just add by the way. We had Geoff Chapin of Carbonwave come on the podcast last year. So if Anyone listening wants to go and find out about their emulsifier. Just go back in the archives and find that episode and I'll link to it at the end as well. But in terms of the directory on your website, tell us a bit more about that because I find that fascinating.

Yes. So although we are raw material manufacturer, we find that the upcycling space is not something that we're going to be able to fill ourselves. And we're aware that of course, there are many other upcycle ingredients. So we hope that by promoting upcycling as a whole, we'll be able to have that bite of a bigger pie as the movement increases in momentum. So on our website we have a directory which has now over 3. I think it's 320 raw materials on there from different raw material manufacturers from all over the world. We don't have a sort of certification to say that they are definitely upcycled, but we're just taking the information that the manufacturers give us. We have a definition which we have on there as well, that we ask the raw material manufacturers to say that the raw materials do fit to, they do adhere to. So yes, that's where we are. And that also sorted by the sort of level of upcycling, whether they're partially upcycled, fully upcycled or even upcycled, certified as well.

Oh, wow. Well, that's a fantastic tool for people out there, formulators, indie brand owners who want to start a. Want to create a formulation that's predominantly based on upcycled materials. Because you then have tried to capture all of the upcycled materials in the world, regardless of whether you stock them or make them. Yes, to make that publicly accessible. Why have you done that?

Well, as I said, we're hoping to build the movement to upcycle ingredients. It's kind of a common sense approach that we should be able to use upcycled ingredients wherever possible. If you think back to the origins of the cosmetics industry, think of materials like lanolin, tallow, even beeswax, arguably that these are all upcycled ingredients. They're all coming from waste of other industries and there's no reason why we can't continue to use them. We've kind of moved away from them, but should be able to go back to them as well.

No, you're absolutely right. Well, let's talk a bit about the cosmetics industry then. What do you think the uptake has been so far in terms of upcycling? Because I know it's a term that started to really gain traction in recent years. What have you seen in your experience?

Well, my origins of upcycling were back in the days when I was formulating, in 2012, 2013, when I was formulating for Marks and Spencer's, a UK brand, and they were taking grape pomace from their own red wine production from Chapel down in Kent, and that was being then processed to be concentrated into resveratrol, a grape resveratrol extract that was going into their pure grape range that then became super grape, and now I think it's referred to as their natural radiance range. So that's sort of 11 years ago or so. But when it comes to upcycling, there's been lots of raw materials that are. Have been upcycled for many years. They've just not necessarily been talked about as being upcycled. Whether that's because brands think that their customers won't necessarily be interested in that or will have a bit of a sort of ink factor. I guess that it's waste, which I guess is the opposite of what we've seen ourselves, that actually people are typically quite interested in that. And so when we see lots of new launches of upcycle ingredients, many of them are actually relaunches. They're just being rebranded, being upcycled. So there's so many examples of that.

Yeah. I think it's fascinating just to tie in on something you just said there, because that's come up in a couple of the interviews that have already been published this year on the. On this podcast, that people, brands are often scared about what you call the ick factor, you know, putting waste on your face, but. So you're not seeing that comeback from consumers, then?

No, well, we see very few brands actually talk about their raw materials. Sorry. Talk about their products being upcycled. But no, we've. We've not really seen that. That kind of factor, I guess that's interesting. It's not like we're taking any from anything that seems particularly unclean, I guess, to start with, as a concept.

Yeah.

Joked about having some raw materials from, say there was one that we joked about being from. If you can think about going around a club at the end of a night, a nightclub at the end of a night, and collecting all of the undrunk drinks and then making an extract or refining the alcohol from that. Minesweeper Tonic was our choke name for it. Whether people would be happy with that, I don't know.

No, I think that comes down to branding, perhaps more so Southern content. Fascinating. Though I'm certainly not seeing that big factor. But as you say, I wonder if brands are sort of keeping it quiet. I mean, this is a term that I've seen in recent times published in the media called green hushing, where people are actually keeping quiet on their green credentials for fear of being found to be lacking in places or not doing enough. And perhaps this ties in with that as well. Well, have you seen the conversation around upcycling change in recent years?

Has the conversation changed? I think it's generally just more accepted and there's many more companies that are interested in it, at least formulators that are interested in it and consumers that are interested in it. The only thing that we have kind of had pushback on, I guess, is there's no certification body for upcycling cosmetics. Much like there's no sort of definition of natural. There's no generally recognized definition of upcycled within cosmetics. When we've been then speaking to other manufacturers, everybody's kind of got their own definition. Not all of them are as, say, as robust as each other.

No, I can believe that. Well, you alluded to that at the beginning. You said partially upcycled, fully upcycled, upcycled certified. What are the differences between those things?

So the only certification that we have found, at least so far with regards to upcycling is from the upcycle Food Association. So this is a US organization that was originally started as a kind of slack network to put food producers and food manufacturers in contact with each other so that they could try and use each other's waste and to minimize any sort of waste. That then became a certification body where they were saying that this product is definitely from food waste one way or another, which is great. And we have a few products that are certified by the upcycle Food Association. The only downside is it is specifically for food. So we have our most. Our range. But then things like our carbon, sorry, charcoal crush can't be certified because that's from forestry waste. And so that's where. That's where we say upcycled certified. So on our ingredient directory, for instance, we have Ethic box for upcycled certified. We are looking at having our own certification in the longer term. So it's something we might be talking about at in cosmetics Global this year.

Yeah, fascinating concept. I do, I do wonder if we need another certification scheme. I feel the beauty industry is sort of drowning in them and I think, think that new indie brand founders are probably sat there going, which one do I go for? So I can see the logic, though, in wanting that transparency, the verification of the fact that someone's actually doing what they say they do. That's it. I don't know what the uptake of that would be. That's an interesting concept.

There are a lot of different certification. I mean, as a raw material ingredient manufacturer, I know how much we spend on each one of these different certifications annually, and it's exorbitant. And, yes, having yet another one feels like it should be unnecessary, but because there's no recognized definition, in the same way that there's no recognized definition of natural, it's something that we're almost forced to do on our own backs.

What do you think the vision could be for the beauty industry when it comes to upcycling?

Well, very much our company vision is that one day every product that's on the shelf is going to be upcycled, so manufactured with and also packaged in upcycled ingredients. So you can imagine going into the supermarket or drugstore or pharmacy in the longer term, and everything on the shelf is packaged in and all the raw materials are upcycled.

Amazing. What a vision to have. And wouldn't that be incredible? So I guess the question I have off the back of that is, is there enough waste from food in particular or other sources for us to achieve that?

Oh, yes, there is. The food industry is many multiples of the time, of the size of the cosmetics industry. So going back to the sort of blueberry and raspberry example, when they suppress one ton of the blueberry juice, for instance, or maybe it's 1.2 tonnes of the blueberry juice, that's enough for us to then produce 100 kilos of our raspberry nitre. Sorry. So they are producing many, many, many tonnes more than we could possibly take. For the gin tonic example, they're producing 10,000 liters of this waste per day.

Wow.

It's a relatively small distillery. We were working with Adams, who are considerably bigger, and I think they were producing 8,000 liters an hour when they're running their distillery of this waste. So we're looking at many multiples of what we could possibly take. We're taking just a drop in the ocean.

Wow. So when you approach these food producers or other producers who have these waste streams, are you seeing that their waste streams are becoming more of a hot commodity now.

For some of them, I guess they could eventually become that. The difficulty for us is that when we first start developing a raw material and we're speaking to those sort of companies asking for their waste. They're seeing us as almost a little tiny annoyance that we're saying we want five kilos. Now we might get back in contact with them in nine months time when we've done some raw material development and then we might need 25 kilos. And then in another 18 months when we start having some customer orders coming in, we might be wanting 100 kilos, 500 kilos, those sorts of things. It may get to the point where they're not going to have enough waste to supply us. But I think that would be a long way down the line.

Yeah, fair enough. And fascinating what we could achieve with that in the beauty industry. What's one final question? Where would you like the upcycled beauty company to be in a few years time? What's the big plan?

Big, big, big plan. Well, I mean we want to keep, keep growing, keep growing in size. So we're signing up distributors globally to hopefully have global coverage for selling for our raw materials. We want to be at the point where we have kind of outgrown our current location or have our own kind of custom built factory. So we're producing constantly and I mean that's it. It's really just a growth from the raw material side of things we'd like to have possibly depends on whether we have our certification scheme set up or whether it is simply just a recognized definition that we're working to and others are able to work to as well. And also more partnerships with other raw material manufacturers. So we realize we're not going to be the only ones in this space. We're very happy to work with other raw material manufacturers.

Exciting times ahead for the upcycled beauty company. If any of our listeners want to learn more about the company, the ingredients you sell want to come and buy from you. How can they do that?

So they can come and speak to us directly. So our contacts email address is hellopcycyclebeauty.com they can also get in contact with us on our LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to follow us. That's where we have all of our updates. Weekly we talk about our raw materials competitors, raw materials and everything that's happening within sort of upcycling and zero waste Beauty or they can follow us on Instagram as well. And yes, that's, that's probably the best place.

Excellent. We will include all of those links in the show notes. So please do go and check out the upcycle beauty company. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been Lovely chatting to you and I can't wait to see what unfolds for the company moving forward.

Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Thanks. Bye. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Are you seeing more upcycled ingredients on the market and which ones would you most like to try in your formulations or your skincare? 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 181 in which I interviewed Jeff Chapin of Carbonwave. You heard us talking about their upcycled emulsifier in the interview I just did with harry or episode 201 a couple of months ago when I spoke with Terence Chung of FRU Skincare who uses upcycled ingredients in the beauty products that they make and sell. 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 Harry and I today for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it and 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 the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica at Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, we're everywhere and come and give me a follow at Lorraine Dharmeyer on Instagram. Visit our website@formulabatanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course post today.