Do you know what your skincare bottles are made of?
You might think you’re a sustainable person, until you look closer at the products you’re using and their packaging.
Okay, do us a favour. Look in your bathroom cupboard and check what each of your skincare bottles are made from. Is it 100% recycled materials? You’d be surprised at what you find. But don’t worry, ours are.
At Yours Only, we use PCR or post-consumer recycled plastic for our CLEAN and COAT bottles, which means they’re manufactured from used, recycled and repurposed plastic that’s picked up from beaches, oceans, land and recycling plants. By recycling these plastics, waste is diverted from ending up in landfill, making our bottles less wasteful and much better than a virgin bottle.
We’ve done plenty of research when it comes to different packaging options for our pretty bottles. We did suss switching over to aluminum, which aside from being double the price (eek!), the shift toward that type of packaging for the purposes of sustainability is actually quite complicated. The production of new aluminum is energy-intensive and environmentally destructive – not our vibe. It’s also made overseas, so we’d need to find a way to offset the carbon from shipping, as our current bottles are Aussie made. It can provide a number of environmental benefits, but only if the recycled materials are used in preference to new aluminum and plastics.
Every year, about 8.8m tons of plastic waste enters our marine environment. That’s basically like a garbage truck filled with plastic, dumping into the ocean every single minute. Horrendous.
We also heard from a reliable source (cough*Zero Waste*cough), that 120 billion units of packaging are produced every year by the global cosmetics industry and in Australia alone, in 1 day, we waste enough bottles and cans to stretch over 4,000km. That’s the whole way across the country! Not ideal.
On that note, we got to thinking about how we can reuse our CLEAN + COAT bottles once they’re empty!
Remove the pump and use a bottle as:
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- a vase for a single flower in the bathroom (cute!)
- an incense holder (but don’t use it while incense is lit!)
- a holder for your eyeshadow brushes
- a holder for your thin paint brushes
- a toothbrush holder
If you have the tools to cut the top off your bottles, you can use as:
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- a makeup brush holder
- a pen holder
- mini pots for plants
In summary, when in doubt – recycle, always! Now, we challenge you to find out what your skincare bottles are made of and start making more sustainable choices for your bathroom – and the planet.
