The drive to improve sustainability levels in beauty packaging continues with department store Selfridges now partnering with MyGroup to launch a nationwide beauty and cosmetics recycling scheme.
The ‘Reselfridges Recycle’ scheme, which will enable customers to return beauty empties, including hard-to-recycle fragrance bottles, is now available at all Selfridges Beauty Halls across Birmingham, Manchester and London’s Oxford Street, “which attracts over 20 million visitors each year alone”, the retailer said.
The scheme will see customers “incentivised” through collecting a Selfridges Unlocked Key for every five items recycled as part of the retailer’s membership programme.
“Reselfridges Recycle is making it easy to recycle fragrance bottles, which are often excluded from both kerbside recycling and other in-store take-back schemes due to residual hazardous contents and mixed packaging materials”, the pair noted.
So the new scheme enables customers to return used perfume, aftershave and other fragrance bottles, along with other beauty and cosmetic items, from any brand, including those still containing product.
They can be deposited in Reselfridges collection boxes across all four stores via a special Unlocked Key requested by customers.
MyGroup, which holds permits to process hazardous and complex waste streams, is managing the full end-to-end collection and processing via its specialist facility in Hull, East Yorkshire. Packaging materials and residual cosmetic product, including fragrance, are recovered and returned to supply chains or remanufactured into new products through its ReFactory operation, avoiding landfill, it noted.
Steve Carrie, group director, MyGroup, said: “[We have] been working with retailers for many years to make beauty take-back a practical, scalable cornerstone of the sector’s commitment to recycling.
“Through our schemes, we’ve now processed more than 40,000 tonnes of returned beauty and cosmetic packaging – success and experience that has helped shape this ambitious Reselfridges collaboration.”
He added: “Fragrance recycling highlights why this experience matters. These products are used at scale but are typically binned after use. Through Reselfridges, we’re applying our established take-back solution in a department store environment, where even the hardest-to-recycle items can be captured at scale in meaningful volumes and recovered safely.”