For many friends, cosmetics and skin care products are necessities of life, and how to deal with the empty bottles of used cosmetics is also a choice that everyone needs to face. With the continuous strengthening of people's awareness of environmental protection, compared with direct discarding, more and more people choose to recycle the used empty cosmetic bottles, hoping to contribute to environmental protection.
1. How to recycle cosmetic bottles
Used bottles and cans
Daily water bottles and cans can be classified into many kinds according to the different materials. But most of them are glass bottles or plastic bottles and cans. These plastic or glass containers that are used for skin care are recyclable.
If these "bottled" or "canned" skin care products and cosmetics are used up, these bottles and cans can be directly thrown into the "recyclables" if there is no surplus.
But if there are some cream products such as water cream, we do not make full use of it. Maybe there is a little bit left. When we need to remove the liquid from skin care products or cosmetics, we can count it as recyclable and put it in the corresponding garbage bin.
Most skin care products and cosmetics
In the process of skin care or make-up, we often use some small items to assist our make-up and skin care, such as makeup brush, powder puff, cotton swab, hair circle for hair binding, etc., which belong to other garbage.
Wet paper towels, facial mask, eye shadow, lipstick, mascara, sunscreen, skin cream, etc., these commonly used skin care products and other waste products belong to other garbage.
But it is worth noting that some expired skin care products or cosmetics belong to hazardous waste.
Nail polish, water and so on.
2. Problems encountered in the recycling of cosmetic bottles
As for cosmetic bottles, the extremely low market recovery rate has always been known to all. The recovery of empty cosmetic bottles is cumbersome, and the material of cosmetic packaging is complex. Take simple oil packaging as an example, only the bottle cover involves soft rubber, EPS (polystyrene foam), PP (polypropylene), metal plating and other materials, and the bottle body is divided into transparent glass, variegated glass and paper label. If you want to recycle an empty bottle of essential oil, you need to sort and classify these materials one by one.
For people engaged in waste recycling, cosmetic bottles are made of a variety of materials. After recycling, they need to be sorted and cleaned. The workload is very large, which is far lower than the income. Moreover, many cosmetic bottles made of materials have few ways to reuse after recycling and are difficult to sell. Therefore, the path of cosmetic bottles through the waste recycling bin is almost zero. For those cosmetics businesses, the cost of building their own recycling channels to recycle cosmetic bottles and then cleaning and reusing them is much higher than that of a newly produced cosmetic bottle.
This low recovery rate of cosmetic bottles has two major problems. One is that it is difficult to decompose naturally after being discarded, which has caused great trouble to the environment. This is incompatible with the current trend of advocating green environmental protection. The other is that some fake cosmetics manufacturers are eyeing cosmetic bottles and sell them by recycling these cosmetic bottles and filling inferior cosmetics. From the above two questions, it can be seen that for cosmetics manufacturers, one is social responsibility to promote environmental protection. The other is related to their own vital interests. Cosmetic bottles are used by fake manufacturers, which infringes on the interests of cosmetic manufacturers.
It is necessary for cosmetic manufacturers to recycle cosmetic bottles. The key lies in how to maximize the reuse after recycling and reduce the recycling cost.
3. On the recycling of cosmetic bottles, the gap between China and developed countries
The sustainable development of cosmetic packaging is a global issue. Countries all over the world have already established corresponding laws and regulations to promote the recycling of resources and reduce the environmental pollution caused by packaging materials.
As early as 1991, the German government promulgated the packaging regulation, which is the first regulation in the world that stipulates that commodity manufacturers and commodity packaging manufacturers bear the costs of classified recycling and treatment of waste packaging containers.
The Japanese government drafted the energy protection and recycling Promotion Law in 1992, and also formulated the new packaging guidelines to avoid excessive packaging.
In May 2018, the Ministry of environment of the Republic of Korea signed the "agreement on spontaneous recycling and utilization of simple packaging" with 19 Korean companies in Seoul. Korean cosmetics companies amore Pacific, LG life health and Aijing signed this agreement. According to the agreement, these enterprises will spontaneously recycle plastic packaging materials and are expected to recycle about 260000 tons of plastic bottles, accounting for 55% of South Korea's plastic bottle exports.
As the world's second largest packaging country after the United States, although China also attaches great importance to environmental protection and has formulated relatively perfect environmental laws and regulations, it is understood that there is no written provision on the recycling of packaging materials for the time being.
4. Awakening of consumers' awareness of environmental protection
China's sustainable consumption report 2021 (hereinafter referred to as the report) was jointly released by business channel vertical and horizontal and interface news recently. The report shows that low-carbon consumption is becoming the daily action of more and more people. More and more consumers hope that the low-carbon consumption market can continue to grow in the future and have more low-carbon products and services to choose from.
The survey found that green, environmental protection and recycling have become the core understanding and expectation of consumers for sustainable consumption. People hope to see relevant carbon emission and resource loss information on commodities, hope that used products can enter a new cycle, and hope that consumption will not be at the cost of polluting the environment.
When referring to low-carbon products, more respondents will think of daily necessities (51.03%) and household building materials and decoration (50.72%), and more respondents choose Electronics (41.83%) and cars and accessories (40.82%).
So what are the reasons for consumers to buy low-carbon products?
The survey shows that "the state and society advocate low-carbon consumption behavior", "care about our world and want to make the environment and society better through their own actions" and "see the news and information about the continuous deterioration of the environment". It can be seen that the positive advocacy and negative warning of the state and society play a great role in guiding public behavior, and stimulate the public's concern for environmental and social issues.
The survey also shows that consumers do not buy low-carbon products mainly because of two major obstacles: one is the inability to identify low-carbon products, and the other is the limited choice of low-carbon products. Therefore, enterprises need to grasp the opportunities of low-carbon consumption, promote the R & D and design of low-carbon products according to the characteristics and diverse and differentiated needs of subdivided groups, and bring more attractive low-carbon consumption choices to the market.
