A number of L’Oréal UK and Ireland’s biggest brands, including L’Oréal Paris and Maybelline New York, have launched powerful new campaigns to drive recycling behaviour change in consumers.
This follows the launch of the Group’s L’Oréal For the Future sustainability programme, which defines quantifiable targets for 2030 to improve packaging, fight climate change, preserve biodiversity and sustain water management. As part of this, alongside transforming its own products and packaging, L’Oréal has ambitions to influence both consumers and suppliers to reduce their own environmental footprints.
This month, the UK’s #1 shampoo and conditioner brand*, L’Oréal Paris Elvive, announced that their bottles will not only be recyclable, but will now be made from 100% recycled plastic**. The move will save an enormous 900 tonnes of plastic, equivalent to the weight of 50 London buses, across 38 million bottles in the UK every year.
Bottles will never be comprised of virgin plastic and one third of the new packaging will be dedicated to clearer recycling instructions while all-metal labels are being completely removed to aid the recycling process.
The accompanying omnichannel campaign incorporates three Elvive bottles manipulated into the shape of the recycling logo and features a prominent call to action to remind consumers to ‘remember to recycle with Elvive’. In addition, L’Oreal Paris Elvive are donating 50p to Recycle Now for each of the first 100,000 Elvive hair treatments sold in Boots. This will support Recycle Now’s mission to help more people recycle more items, including bathroom plastics, more often.
As the market leader in beauty, we believe that we have a responsibility to lead the way in driving consumers to make sustainable choices. The ambitions of our L’Oréal for the Future programme are to empower those across our value chain – both consumers and suppliers – to reduce their own environmental footprints too
The bottle re-launch from L’Oréal Paris Elvive is followed by Maybelline New York’s ‘Make-Up, Not Make Waste’ campaign launch, the UK’s largest make-up recycling programme. The brand has partnered with TerraCycle to offer a solution in over 1000 locations across branches of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Superdrug and Boots for consumers to recycle their makeup empties across any brand, not just Maybelline.
A marketing campaign will mobilise the UK public to recycle and consumers will be directed to find their nearest recycling station using the interactive map at maybelline.co.uk/store-locator. When recycling stations are full, partner TerraCycle will collect the waste from stores to be cleaned and fully recycled.
Maybelline’s new makeup recycling scheme joins Kiehl’s established Recycle and Be Rewarded Scheme, which focuses on incentivising recycling of non-makeup beauty products through rewarding customers who bring in empty products in-store to be recycled.
The scheme has already seen 11 million empty jars and bottles recycled globally to date, and this month the brand has introduced additional incentives and discounts to further encourage customers to recycle in store. Another addition to the scheme is that customers can vote for an environmental project they wish to support. This follows Kiehl’s 2019 partnership with UK environmental charity Hubbub which funded ‘Vitamin Sea’, a new 99% recycled plastic boat for Hubbub’s Plastic Fishing initiative. Made from recycled plastics including Kiehl’s packaging, Vitamin Sea now takes businesses and schools on eye-opening litter picking trips to help clear London’s waterways of plastic.
Vismay Sharma, Country Managing Director of L’Oréal UK & Ireland, said: “Across our network of brands in the UK, we are both changing our own products to make packaging more sustainable and making significant investments to enable and inspire consumers to recycle beauty products. As the market leader in beauty, we believe that we have a responsibility to lead the way in driving consumers to make sustainable choices. The ambitions of our L’Oréal for the Future programme are to empower those across our value chain – both consumers and suppliers – to reduce their own environmental footprints too.”
