Historically, hard-to-recycle beauty packaging ends up in landfills, incinerators, oceans, or as other pollution. Pact Collective’s collection programs have helped redirect this used beauty packaging to be repurposed, recycled, or properly processed rather than becoming waste.
Now, Pact Collective has taken the next step in their mission with the creation of NewMatter™ 100% recycled content resin, created using material collected via their specialty programs. This initiative began on a smaller scale to ensure implementation was feasible, sustainable and/or scalable before producing larger amounts of the material, particularly since many packaging suppliers are located overseas and will require the material to be shipped. Beauty packaging is small and light, meaning the program volume on its own is currently insufficient to meet the required threshold for resin production; consolidating the material with another source of hard-to-recycle packaging (in this instance, ocean-bound plastic) was a critical step in producing this recycled content resin.
Pact teamed up with clean beauty retailer Credo Beauty to pilot the NewMatter™ 100% recycled content resin. Collaboration across Credo’s supply chain resulted in creating a mono-material pump made of ~83% NewMatter™ resin. The pump production used 500 kg of recycled plastic, saving the equivalent of 86 gallons of gasoline or 10,396 Kwh of energy. The resin is now commercially available to Pact Collective members.