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Garnier, TerraCycle Launch Campaign to Divert 1M Beauty Empties from Landfill

Despite the rise of recyclable packaging for beauty and personal care products, only half of US consumers responsibly dispose of these products. To boost bathroom recycling, beauty brand Garnier has teamed up with TerraCycle and DoSomething.org to launch the second year of Rinse, Recycle, Repeat, a national recycling campaign and college campus competition that aims to educate young people on how to responsibly recycle their beauty and personal care products.

By Sustainable Brands | Published 6 years ago | About a 4 minute read

Despite the rise of recyclable packaging for beauty and personal care products, only half of US consumers responsibly dispose of these products. To boost bathroom recycling, beauty brand Garnier has teamed up with TerraCycle and DoSomething.org to launch the second year of Rinse, Recycle, Repeat, a national recycling campaign and college campus competition that aims to educate young people on how to responsibly recycle their beauty and personal care products. Through the campaign, Garnier hopes to divert 1 million empty personal care products from landfills by the end of 2018.

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SB'18 Vancouver program!Beauty and personal care product packaging bearing a #1 or #2 symbol can be recycled through curbside recycling programs, but many other products cannot, including flexible tubes, caps, pumps, lipstick and eyeliner. These items will be the focus of this year’s Rinse, Recycle, Repeat campaign. The campaign will also showcase best practices to identify recyclable items, such as checking the numbers on packaging before tossing it out, and provide campaign participants with tips on what can and cannot be recycled.

“We’re excited to work with young people around the country to make a positive impact on the environment,” said Aria Finger, CEO at DoSomething.org. “We’re proud to be working with Garnier, a brand that continuously demonstrates its commitment to sustainable beauty, to once again activate young people to give these products new purpose and to help them reach their goal of collecting 1 million empties in 2018.”

To mark the start of the campaign, Garnier has released a public service announcement, starring actress and Garnier brand ambassador Mandy Moore, to educate young consumers about how to responsibly recycle their bathroom empties.

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Once the bin is filled with 10 pounds of beauty empties, participants can print a free shipping label to send their empties to TerraCycle. Once collected, TerraCycle will recycle the packaging into pelletized lumber, which will then be used to build Garnier Green Gardens.

On April 1st, a competition will kick off on 50 college campuses nationwide to collect the most beauty empties. The college team that collects the most empties by April 30th will be rewarded a garden for their community furnished by Garnier and TerraCycle.

The Rinse, Recycle, Repeat campaign is part Garnier’s larger Beauty Recycling Program, a free, national beauty and personal care recycling program for the collection of empties that cannot otherwise be recycled. Since its inception in 2011, the Beauty Recycling Program has diverted more than 10 million empties from landfill.

These empties have been turned into pelletized plastic lumber for raised garden beds, benches, trash receptacles and other elements for community parks, playgrounds and gardens in Nebraska, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio and New York. Garnier and TerraCycle have already installed nine Garnier Green Gardens throughout the United States that engage hundreds of thousands of individuals in the surrounding communities, and will plant an additional two by the end of 2018. One garden will be granted to the winner of the Rinse, Recycle, Repeat challenge and the other to a local NGO in New York City, the location of the brand’s US headquarters. This garden will be planted by L’Oréal USA employees through the company’s annual Volunteer Day initiative.