Beauty Is As Beauty Does

The “Company Profile” is an Earth911.com series highlighting consumer goods and services making a difference through product stewardship and recycling. Products and services featured do not pay for placement and are not endorsed by Earth911.com.

Aveda was founded in 1978 with the goal of providing high performance, botanically based beauty products that can be better for your body, as well as for the planet. After 30 years in business, the company continues this tradition through a number of innovative environmental programs.

One if these initiatives is Aveda’s Responsible Packaging program, which seeks to green the company’s product packaging by:

• Considering the life cycle analysis of packaging options
• Reducing the size, weight and production processes of packaging
• Offering packaging that can be recycled whenever possible
• Using the most environmentally sound materials, and as much post-consumer recycled (PCR) content, as commercially possible
• Using renewable energy to manufacture and fill packaging
• Challenging packaging partners to meet these standards as well

For example, most of Aveda’s plastic bottles use a minimum of 80 percent PCR materials, reducing the company’s need for over 300 tons of virgin high-density polyethylene (HDPE) on an annual basis. To learn more about these guiding principles, the company’s tagline, “Beauty is as Beauty Does,” and how they are helping the planet today, Earth911 spoke with Aveda’s Director of New and Environmental Media, Evan Miller.

Plastic Isn’t Food

Have you ever given a second thought to what happens to your bottle caps? You know, those threaded neck caps on shampoo, water, soda, milk and other beverage bottles, flip top caps on tubes and food product bottles (think ketchup and mayonnaise), laundry detergent and peanut butter jar lids? We hadn’t either, until we learned about the Recycle Caps with Aveda program.

Aveda (a Sanskrit word meaning all knowledge) has been contributing to beauty since 1978.

The inspiration for the program came a few years ago, when the company’s vice president of packaging development saw a story about plastic in the ocean, and how sea animals, like birds, were eating the plastic and dying as a result. “He wanted to make it his personal goal to see how Aveda could collect the plastic in the ocean, and turn around and use it for our packaging,” said Miller.

Unfortunately, the plastic in the ocean is too degraded to reuse, so the company re-focused on preventing it from reaching the sea in the first place.

How Plastic Reaches the Sea

Depending on the program, many recyclers will not recycle bottle caps, since they are usually a different type of plastic from the bottle. While bottles are often plastic #1 PET or plastic #2 HDPE, the bottle caps described above tend to be made of plastic #5 polypropylene. Often, these caps are chopped off during the recycling process and sent to landfills. Once in landfills, these lightweight caps easily blow in the breeze, get picked up by animals or get caught in water runoff and eventually make their way to the sea.

Kicked off at New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2009, the program collects caps at Aveda stores, participating Aveda salons and over 80 schools and boy and girl scout troops around the country.

Aveda researchers realized the old caps could be remade into pellets and molded into new caps and packaging. Now, Aveda’s caps on select products are the first to be 100 percent recycled. “We aren’t adding any chemicals. We could make caps the same color, but we don’t want to add any dyes,” said Miller. “The first product we launched it on, every bottle had a different color. Even though they all ended up being gray, it’s cool that every bottle is kind of unique.”

This first product was Aveda’s Vintage Clove Shampoo. To celebrate the company’s three decades of environmental awareness, the vintage-style bottle is made out of a minimum of 80 percent recycled milk jugs, along with the company’s new, 100 percent recycled caps.

So far, the campaign has been very successful, and at the time of this interview, Aveda had already collected 65,000 pounds of plastic caps. Translation: A lot of caps. A lot.

Bringing it Together

Aveda “believes that authentic beauty is one that works in harmony with the greater web of life.”

“The gentleman who founded our company created the company with the vision of connecting beauty and the environment and well-being into one,” said Miller. “He didn’t want to provide customers with anything that was unsafe to be put on your body and put back into the environment. We have designed every product that way.”

While the overall goal of the Recycle Caps with Aveda program is to keep plastic out of ocean, the company is hoping for more far-reaching effects. “Our goal is to influence other beauty companies to create packaging out of recycled content and to get local recyclers to see the void in the recycling stream,” said MIller.

In 2009, the recycled caps will be used for Aveda’s line of professional hair color. “We create more color than almost any other product. We saw that was one of our top-selling products, and that will launch 2009. Later in 2009, we’re going to institute the recycled caps into our liter size shampoo bottles for consumer purchase.”

Favorite R

For Miller, his favorite “R” is “reduce, because there are so many things that you can reduce your consumption by reusing. The caps program is a perfcet example, by reducing the amount of waste, you’re not only saving marine life and oceans, but you are reusing product over and over again.”