The circular economy and carbon neutrality by 2050

Making beauty product packaging environmentally friendly is a challenge for the beauty industry for reasons that include using mixing plastic materials and having poor recyclability as a result of packaging design and branding.  Beauty Kitchen is a UK-based cosmetics company with a focus on sustainable packaging. It’s ’Return, Refill, Repeat’ programme, launched in partnership with Unilever, enables customers to drop off empty containers at any Holland & Barrett store in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, or Belgium to be sent back to Beauty Kitchen. Consumers will then receive 100 ‘Reward for Life’ points at the retailer.
Beauty Kitchen is a UK-based cosmetics company with a focus on sustainable packaging. It’s ’Return, Refill, Repeat’ programme, launched in partnership with Unilever, enables customers to drop off empty containers at any Holland & Barrett store in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, or Belgium to be sent back to Beauty Kitchen. Consumers will then receive 100 ‘Reward for Life’ points at the retailer.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, greenhouse gas concentrations have reached a record high. In the case of carbon dioxide (CO2),the growth in 2020 exceeded the average for the last decade; despite a 5.6% drop in fossil fuel CO2 emissions driven by COVID-19 restrictions. This continued rise in CO2 concentration is directly linked to our massive consumption of fossil fuels. In a study published in the journal Green Energy & Environment, a group of researchers from Renmin University of China propose a new method to capture CO2 using sunlight as the energy source and modified sawdust as the CO2 absorbent. In addition to capturing CO2, their method also avoids using the fossil fuels that would create additional CO2. Importantly, the absorption method they have developed is reversible, so the captured CO2 can be used to generate other products, such as methanol, ethanol and methane.