Hull recycling specialist MyGroup has partnered with leading luxury retailer Harrods on a trial scheme to handle used cosmetic products.
A first for the UK high street, the three month pilot launches this weekend, with customers at one of the iconic brand’s regional H Beauty stores encouraged to return exhausted make-up, fragrance and skincare products rather than throwing them away.
The scheme, which will see all the collected items returned to the city site, will include hazardous nail polish products and other items previously considered unrecyclable. To further incentivise customers, the scheme will be aligned to Harrods’ rewards programme, giving access to a range of experiences and benefits.
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Mia Collins, head of beauty at Harrods, said: “The launch of the scheme marks another incredible milestone for Harrods and H Beauty, showcasing our commitment to bringing a more circular and sustainable shopping experience to our customers and encouraging the H Beauty community to recycle beauty packaging and products that are not able to be recycled by traditional kerbside collections.
“As a leading voice in the UK beauty industry, we are committed to making beauty more circular, and by partnering with MyGroup we are able to capture more materials that might otherwise have found their way into landfill and waterways. I am proud to be working with MyGroup to drive this sustainability initiative and increase recycling and circularity across the beauty industry.”
MyGroup has provided recycling bins to be placed by the tills to welcome compacts, mascara and eye shadow containers, shampoo and skincare bottles, lotion pumps and vitamin bottles. The company is described as a market leader in processing cosmetic waste and has invested in a series of advanced technological processes at its Hull facility, meaning both the packaging and inner product of the cosmetic items can be fully extracted, processed and recycled. It has played a huge role in the pharmaceutical and medical sphere, collecting Covid testing equipment to deal with the huge impact of a new single-use product.
Steve Carrie, director of MyGroup, said: ‘We’re proud to be working alongside one of the iconic, luxury brands of British retail to reach new customers with our ground-breaking cosmetics and plastic recycling offering. MyGroup is trusted by a growing number of high-profile, forward-thinking partners in the retail space, who see the tangible, visible difference our in-store take back schemes can make to meeting their sustainability goals.’
Collected products will be either composted, repurposed and returned to the supply chain, or manufactured into MyGroup’s unique construction material solution for ‘unrecyclable’ plastic waste, MyBoard.
It is similar to plywood, and used widely for joinery, shop and event fittings, as well as by the company’s ReFactory team to manufacture products for sale or use in community settings, such as benches and desks for schools.
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