Who hasn’t opened a bathroom cupboard on a cleaning spree, scanned the shelves of half-full volumiser, long-forgotten eye shadow palettes and blunt razors and tossed them in the bin – one guilty, satisfying clunk at a time? Very few of us, since 95% of cosmetic packaging is thrown away.
Given the Australian cosmetics and beauty industry was valued at $17.25b in 2025, this amounts to an incredible volume of waste. To add insult to injury, almost 60% of beauty packaging is made from plastic, with the complicated makeup of spray bottles, pumps and tubes meaning they are difficult to recycle.
