Plastic Free July with Beauty Kitchen

This month is no ordinary month…it’s Plastic Free July! Beauty Kitchen are dedicating an entire month to challenging you to wave goodbye to single use plastic and say hello to some simple sustainable swaps.

The first thing we want you to remember is that we’re not expecting everyone to be perfect at this! There’s a saying that goes a little like “we want millions of people to do something imperfectly, rather than just one single person doing it perfectly.” It’s incredibly difficult to avoid plastic completely because it’s so ingrained in the way we live and shop, but with small steps we can make a big impact.

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Why do we care?

It can’t be that bad right? After all, plastic has revolutionised every industry from beauty, electric, food and so on by providing a cheap material that would last infinitely. This element of plastic however is now its own downfall and has now spurred on a sense of convenience with single use plastic products.

To put it into context, every piece of plastic ever made still exists in one way or another, and by 2025 more than 600 million tons of plastic will have been produced on the globe. What about recycling? Well, the mechanics of recycling isn’t quite right yet, as in reality only 9% of plastic in the world is recycled, the rest of it is dumped in a controlled manner (40%), burnt in a controlled manner (14%) or ends up in our environment somehow (32%).

If we continue to use and produce plastic at the same rate that we do now, there will be more plastic in the ocean tonne for tonne than fish by 2050.

Microbeads vs Microplastics

Remember that we mentioned 32% of plastic ends up our environment? Well, it takes plastic around 450 years to degrade, and in that time, it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller particles we call microplastics. In the beauty industry, some brands would purposely add tiny plastic particles to products intentionally for example, scrubs for an exfoliating effect. In 2018, several countries, including the UK, banned the use of these microbeads. However, almost all major beauty brands still add synthetic liquid microplastic ingredients into the formulas (often as cheap filler ingredients). Through our sinks, showers and baths these microplastics flow through our water systems and, yep you guessed it, part of our rivers and oceans. Queue the term – The Plastic Soup.

Our Solution to Plastic Pollution

We’ve covered the topic of microplastics already, and we are proud to say that all our product formulations are (and always will be!) microplastic free. What’s on the inside counts of course, but we took sustainability that extra step further by using packaging that we can reuse.

Once you’ve finished with your favourite cleanser or face mask for example, just pop that in the post to us free of charge and we will wash the packaging and reuse it time and time again. We’ve now saved over 4 million single use bottles from going to landfill now!

“I wanted to make choosing a truly sustainable product, whether it’s your face cream, your body wash, or your shampoo, as simple of a choice as possible. The beauty industry is renowned for being wasteful and I want Beauty Kitchen to be able to change this and lead by example. Plastic Free July for me is about making small changes that collectively make a huge difference to plastic waste, and that definitely includes your beauty routine.” – Jo Chidley, Founder of Beauty Kitchen.

Small Changes Make Big Impact

We’re working on making sustainable beauty products accessible to you, which is a great starting point. Our first tip is to take note of what you already have before buying anything new, so you’re not wasting anything that’s unused from the very beginning. Ran out of your super nourishing moisturiser, or need to replace your accessories? Then fair enough, take a look at Beauty Kitchen!

There are also so many other small changes that you can make to go plastic free in and out of the home, these are some of our favourites from the Beauty Kitchen team:

Join us on our social platforms for a whole month dedicated to our Plastic Free July Challenge where we’ll be discussing simple swaps, sharing yours and including some great giveaways to kick start your Effective, Natural & Sustainable routines!

Written by The Beauty Kitchen Team