An incredible new two-part pump and refill system from the International Institute for Active Ageing could dramatically reduce waste plastic from beauty products, Glamour Magazine reports.
Plastic is one of the big problems in the beauty industry. Most beauty products come in specialized plastic containers that are hard to fully empty, difficult to reuse, nearly impossible to recycle, and extremely likely to end up in a landfill or polluting the ocean.
Some companies offer plastic-free packaging options, and others have recycling programs, but according to Greenpeace, only about 5% of plastic products get recycled in the U.S. That's nowhere near enough to protect our environment from the impact of this material.
But the IIAA's new invention could change all that.
The system is designed to replace the pump bottles many beauty and skincare products come in. Currently, these packages are often made of multiple materials put together in a way that makes them impossible to recycle, and the single-use design means you're throwing away the whole pump apparatus every time you finish a bottle.
"The bottom line: If you want to make something more sustainable, the first thing that you must do is you must use less material," Joseph Alpert, one of the project's design consultants, told Glamour.
The IIAA's design consists of two parts: an exterior bottle with a pump and separate refills in soft, compostable packaging.
"You have a dispenser that you keep for life and then a refill," Alpert said, per Glamour. "And the refill is where all of the innovation is."
According to Alpert, the refills are "made from a material called 'paper foam,' which is made from waste potato starch and paper in Holland."
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🔘 Using less plastic packaging 🗑️
🔘 Using more organic ingredients 🌿
🔘 Recycling empty containers 🫙
🔘 I don't buy clean beauty products 🚫
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"So it's not like the coffee cups that you get, where they're still going to behave like plastic unless they end up in one of the industrial composting facilities," he added. "90% of the weight of this product is now home compostable, and then the rest of it you send for recycling. And that saving in plastic weight is a big environmental impact."
A soft bag design also makes it easy to open the package and get the last bit of product, which saves you money and means you'll need fewer total packages in the end.
Best of all, the IIAA has made this new design free to use — so hopefully, we'll see it on the shelves soon.
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