The average American bathroom cabinet holds an estimated 40 personal care products, including shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face wash, moisturizer, sunscreen, deodorant, makeup. Most of the containers will end up in a landfill, whether or not they pass through the recycling bin first.
In 2018, U.S. manufacturers produced 7.9 billion units of rigid plastic for the beauty and personal care category alone, and that figure doesn’t include tubes, flexible sachets, aerosol cans, cardboard outer packaging, or the shipping materials behind each product. Globally, the cosmetics industry floods the market with 120 billion units of packaging annually. The gap between what the industry calls “recyclable” and what the system actually recovers is the story you don’t want to think about when doing your makeup in the morning.
What Your Curbside Bin Actually Takes
Materials recovery facilities, often referred to as MRFs (“murphs”), are the sorting plants behind your curbside recycling. They are engineered around a narrow set of materials: cardboard, paper, aluminum cans, glass bottles, and rigid plastic containers made from PET (#1) or HDPE (#2) that are larger than about 2 inches on at least one side. Most personal care and beauty packaging are too small to be captured for processing, so head straight to landfill.
What curbside generally accepts from the bathroom: large HDPE #2 shampoo and conditioner bottles, some body wash bottles (if PET or HDPE), and full-size liquid soap dispensers but only with the pump mechanism removed. That’s essentially the full list.
What it doesn’t take: pump dispensers (the spring mechanism is mixed metal and plastic), mascara tubes and wands (black plastic can’t be detected by MRF optical sorters), lipstick tubes (metal and plastic bonded), compacts (mixed materials, often with mirrors), anything smaller than a credit card, deodorant sticks (linear low-density polyethylene with multi-material components), travel-size containers, tinted or opaque plastic jars, and aerosols with remaining product inside.
Wishcycling, the act placing an item in the recycling bin in hope that someone downstream will sort it out, is particularly costly. Contaminated loads get rejected at MRFs, meaning a single mascara wand can contribute to an entire bag of otherwise recyclable plastic being landfilled.
The Take-Back Programs That Exist
The gap between what curbside handles and what consumers generate is the territory that dedicated take-back programs have tried to fill. The largest is Pact Collective, a nonprofit founded in 2021 with retail partners including Ulta, L’Occitane, Nordstrom, and Credo Beauty.
Pact’s 2024 Impact Report is impressive: more than 227,000 pounds of beauty packaging were collected that year across 3,300 bins in the U.S. and Canada. The organization engaged an estimated 546,000 consumers, more than double its 2023 reach. Those are meaningful numbers for a five-year-old program.
TerraCycle operates a complementary channel: its Zero Waste Boxes for personal care packaging accept virtually anything — tubes, wands, compacts, razors, nail polish bottles — for a per-box fee ranging from $131 to $343 depending on box size. The cost is enough of a barrier that participation skews toward committed sustainability buyers rather than average households.
Origins stores accept empty cosmetic packaging from any brand; Kiehl’s runs a similar in-store program. What each program does with collected material varies.
What Responsible Brands Are Actually Doing
The more durable solutions are emerging at the product-design stage, before packaging is ever made, rather than at the collection level after it becomes waste.
Solid formats are the most structurally interesting shift. Shampoo bars, conditioner bars, toothpaste tablets, solid deodorant sticks, and waterless concentrated formulas eliminate the container problem by eliminating the liquid that necessitates it. Lush, Ethique, HiBar, and dozens of smaller brands have built businesses on this model; Unilever and Procter & Gamble have introduced solid format lines under mass-market brands. The global shampoo bar market was valued at $11.57 billion in 2025 and is growing at roughly 6 percent annually, though that is still modest as a share of total haircare. Nevertheless, it is no longer a niche category.
Refillable packaging is the other approach taking root. The design task is building a container durable enough to be refilled rather than discarded, and a distribution system that makes refilling as convenient as buying new. In-store refill stations exist at Kiehl’s, Lush, and a growing number of independent retailers. The underlying concept — durable packaging as a service, returned and cleaned between uses — is being iterated on across the market even as the logistics of making it work at scale remain unresolved.
Designing packaging for actual recyclability, rather than for marketing claims, is moving from voluntary to mandatory. Oregon’s comprehensive packaging EPR law went into enforcement on July 1, 2025, requiring brands selling into the state to join a producer responsibility organization and pay fees based on the volume and recyclability of their packaging.
California’s program is under regulatory review, with producer fees expected in late 2026. Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, Maine, and Washington are in various stages of implementation. Brands selling nationally are beginning to standardize on EPR-compliant packaging rather than manage separate supply chains by state.
What We’re Paying Either Way
The household cost of personal care and beauty products is substantial. American consumers spend an average of $303 per year on beauty products per person, and that figure may understate actual household spending, which averages $1,064 annually for women and $728 for men across the full range of products.
Embedded in every one of those purchases is a packaging cost: materials, molding, printing, shipping. That cost is already paid by the consumer. Whether the packaging is subsequently recovered or landfilled, the household has financed its production. When it’s landfilled, the public system absorbs the disposal cost in the form of tipping fees, recycling contamination management expenses, and pricey landfill capacity. The recycling gap isn’t on the receipt, but you still pay these costs.
Extended producer responsibility laws shift a portion of that cost back to brands. Oregon’s fee structure will eventually price packaging material, weight, and recyclability into brand cost structures, rewarding packaging that can be recovered. California’s program is projected to generate hundreds of millions in producer fees annually, a portion of which will fund the recycling infrastructure that Pact Collective and TerraCycle are currently building on nonprofit budgets. EPR doesn’t eliminate the cost. It redirects who pays it.
What You Can Do
At home, with curbside recycling:
- Large HDPE #2 shampoo, conditioner, and body wash bottles are generally accepted. Rinse them and remove pump dispensers before placing them in the bin. The bottle: recyclable. The pump: trash.
- Mascara wands, lipstick tubes, compacts, deodorant sticks, travel-size containers, and tinted plastic jars should not go in curbside recycling.
For everything curbside won’t take:
- Pact Collective bins at Ulta, L’Occitane, Nordstrom, and Credo Beauty locations accept tubes, wands, compacts, and pumps. Use pactcollective.org to find the nearest drop-off.
- Origins stores accept empty cosmetic packaging from any brand, no purchase required.
- TerraCycle’s personal care Zero Waste Box accepts razors, packaging, and beauty accessories; the per-box fee makes it most practical for households accumulating significant volume over time.
Shifting what you buy:
- Look for solid format shampoo bars, conditioner bars, toothpaste tablets, and solid deodorant that eliminate the packaging problem by eliminating the container. Ethique, Lush, HiBar, and Unwrap Life are dedicated solid-format brands; most major brands now offer at least one solid line.
- When buying liquid products, look for large-format HDPE #2 or PET #1 containers, avoid black or deeply tinted plastic, and skip pump dispensers where a squeeze bottle or bar alternative exists.
- Refill programs at Kiehl’s and Lush reduce the packaging footprint across multiple purchases. Ask at independent beauty retailers about in-store refill programs, which are expanding faster than they’re advertised.
Pushing the industry:
- Pact Collective’s brand member list at pactcollective.org identifies companies that have committed to take-back and packaging recyclability. It’s a useful signal when choosing between similar products.
- If you’re in Oregon, California, or another EPR state, your purchasing decisions signal demand to brands now paying attention to packaging composition. EPR fees are already reshaping packaging decisions; consumer preference accelerates that.
Related Reading
Editor’s Note: This is part of Earth911’s “Where Waste Comes From” series, which examines the largest sources of waste in a typical American household — what it costs you, what it costs everyone, and what to do about it.