Cover Story: Aveda Prevents Plastics from Polluting Oceans
Trying to find a way to combat ocean pollution and save marine life ultimately led to the creation of Aveda’s Caps Collection Program and the first 100% postconsumer recycled polypropylene cap.
In 2005, the issue of plastic pollution in oceans was brought to the attention of Aveda by Michael Braungart, coauthor of the book Cradle-to-Cradle. There were numerous reports that the amount of plastics in the world’s oceans had risen sharply over the past five decades—and packages for beauty products were contributing to this pollution. Aveda was concerned, and began to think about what could be done to help.
The United States doesn’t have a recycling infrastructure in place to collect and recycle loose polypropylene (PP) closures. These types of caps end up in landfills, littering beaches, and even migrating to oceans where the material can travel for thousands of miles. The fact that this plastic lasts for a very long time makes the situation even worse. Because plastic floats, sea creatures often mistake colorful caps for food.
An article written by Kenneth R. Weiss and published in the Los Angeles Times on August 2, 2006, reported on the ocean’s pollution crisis. The article stated that an estimated one million seabirds choke or become tangled in plastic nets or other debris every year.
“About 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other marine mammals, and sea turtles suffer the same fate,” wrote Weiss. He also stated that many albatross lay their eggs and hatch their young in a place called Midway, an atoll located halfway between North America and Japan. “Of the 500,000 chicks born here each year, about 200,000 die, mostly from dehydration and starvation,” Weiss stated. A two-year study funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that chicks that died from those causes had twice as much plastic in their stomachs as chicks that died from other causes, according to the same article.
Aveda started to become involved with the cause to help the ocean’s plastic crisis in 2005. “We were surprised to learn there was more plastic than plankton in the Pacific Ocean. When we found out that this was becoming especially life-threatening to the albatross and gray whales, we wanted to see what we could do to help,” says John Delfausse, vice president of global package development and chief environmental officer for Estée Lauder Corporate Packaging.
Aveda’s team began researching the possibility of harvesting enough plastic out of the oceans to reuse in packaging—but soon that plan proved to be impossible. “We found that the material harvested would be unusable due to the many different types of plastics and due to the level of degradation of the plastic by ultraviolet light and sea water,” explains Delfausse.
It is a fact that bottle caps comprise a very large percentage of the type of plastics found in the oceans, so Aveda came up with a better solution. “We felt that if we couldn’t use the material in the oceans already, then perhaps we could do far more good by keeping plastic bottle caps out of our oceans in the first place,” says Delfausse.
From this idea, the first-ever caps-recycling program in the United States was born. Since the beginning of spring 2008, Aveda’s Caps Collection program has collected more than 50,000 pounds of plastic. Aveda’s 30th Anniversary Vintage Clove Shampoo bottles contain dispensing caps made from 100% postconsumer recycled polypropylene—all collected from the program.
“Aveda’s Caps Recycling Program was created to help combat the devastating effects of plastic cap pollution and to increase awareness of this critical issue,” says Chuck Bennett, Aveda’s vice president of earth and community care. “Recycling caps is a meaningful form of environmental activism. Every cap we that prevent from becoming trash is one less piece of plastic in the mouth of a baby seal, penguin, or turtle.”
For more information about Aveda’s Caps Collection program and how it made possible the first 100% recycled polypropylene cap in the beauty industry, see the cover story in CPC Packaging’s September 2008 issue, or click here to read the story.
More on Aveda's Caps-Collection Program
Feature:
The Evolution of a Cap
Sidebars:
Closing the Loop
How Schoolchildren Helped
From the July/August Issue: Aveda's Caps-Collection Project