Composting beauty 101
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In an ever-lasting quest to make my beauty routine greener, I always try to look out for sustainable cosmetic options. As I previously wrote about, it really isn’t easy to navigate through the sea of “clean”, “green” beauty and skincare without falling into consumer traps like greenwashing. Ingredient sourcing, production methods and product disposal all contribute to an overall brand’s sustainability and it really is up to us as consumers to decide whether a brand is doing “enough”.
At this point I feel like it’s important to explain the sustainable order of priority in which I think about all purchases, and maybe specifically to my beauty purchases :
REDUCE : Don’t buy products you don’t need / simplify your beauty routine (remove unnecessary steps) / don’t buy brands that have a lot of extra wrapping packaging,
REUSE : Buy refills rather than full products / repurpose cute + useful containers, use beauty products for other uses than what they’re made for (ex. a so-so face cream makes a good body one),
REGIFT : If you won’t use a product or part of it, gift if to someone who will and will enjoy it,
COMPOST : When you first receive the product, compost the extra packaging if compostable / If you’re done with a product or if it has gone bad, compost the product and / or its packaging,
RECYCLE : When you first receive the product, recycle the extra packaging if it is recyclable / If you’re done with a product or if it has gone bad, recycle packaging if it’s recyclable,
TRASH : Trash initial or residual packaging only as a last resort.
Enter KOV Skincare. I was first targeted by one of their instagram ads (probably late at night, while scrolling indefinitely) before their official launch. This Canadian brand is pretty much 100% aligned with my beauty philosophy. KOV offers a minimal amount of products, crafted from ethically sourced, local ingredients. They’re dedicated to educating their customers, which they do by running an incredibly well written blog. One of their articles described the composting process of bioplastics and how their refill options were “compost-safe”.
As I had just recently been made aware (I have to thank my beautiful friend Catherine for sparking the curiosity in me), exactly as it is for recyclable products, not all “compostable” materials are created equal. It isn’t because a plastic bag or wrapper has a “compostable” logo or mention on it that you can, without any worry, place it in your composting bin. Karen Stoeffler, from the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), puts it this way : “ There really isn’t a timescale associated with biodegradability [...] If we absolutely wanted to be of bad faith, we could say that a conventional polyethylene bag is biodegradable, because within 200 to 500 years, we would end up with water, carbon dioxide, and petroleum.”. So how do we go forward and make sure what we’re purchasing as “compostable” actually ends up being bin-safe? As a matter of fact, it turns out that composting requirements for plastics depend entirely on the waste management authority of the region we live in. So I went and dug a little deeper to first and foremost, find out what IS compostable for me.
In my area, the city of Montreal is responsible for compost management. They accept only biodegradable plastics under norm ASTM D6400. This organisation tests biodegradability under precise conditions to make sure what we put in the bin returns back to its organic form in less than 180 days.
So what exactly does this mean for us? Well, for one, it means that our implication in the RRR (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) process has to be constant and careful. We have to step in and take all precautions to make sure what we’re composting is safe. Like I’ve suggested in a previous article, making a list of brands that have passed our own “green test” is a good idea if you don’t feel like doing your research every time you need to make a beauty purchase. That’s why I appreciate brands like KOV, which make it easy for us to find the information and measures to take.
Sources :
KOV Skincare, “Is compostable packaging really compostable?”, 2021, https://kovskincare.com/blogs/news/is-compostable-packaging-really-compostable
Radio-Canada, “Plastiques : ne tombez pas dans le sac!”, 2019, https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1167574/sac-plastique-recyclable-biodegradable-compsotable-recherche
