How to minimise waste in your nail salon

Green Salon Collective was founded in 2020 by environmental experts, campaigners and beauty professionals, with an aim to help member salons in the UK and Ireland to responsibly dispose of their waste. For its next blog with Scratch, the Collective offers an insight into waste solutions.

Your salon probably disposes of a lot of stuff that cannot be recycled or composted. Examples include chemicals and personal protective equipment (PPE). It is likely that much of this ends up with the rest of your general waste, but this can put unnecessary pressure on landfill sites. In this article you will learn about how you can minimise the negative environmental impacts of some of your salon’s non-recyclables, as well as key ways to minimise your overall waste footprint.

Some things are non-recyclable but it is incredibly important to make sure those things do not end up in landfill. Read our previous blog to understand why.

Reusability

Before looking for ethical ways to dispose of waste in your salon, it may be a good idea to consider the sources and whether there is anything your team can do to minimise your output to begin with. Finding products and even packaging that are reusable is a good start. You may want to look into the reusability of things like face masks, cups and mugs, and even foil.

Repairability

Before investing in new kit for your salon, find out whether it can be repaired. Electronics, in particular, have a funny way of being designed so that only the same manufacturers can carry out repairs. Or worse yet you may encounter ‘planned obsolescence’ – where something is designed to be useful for only a limited lifespan after which it is unfashionable or unusable. Start by looking for brands that offer repair services for their products.

Compostability

Compostable products and packaging are gaining traction. This is partly due to growing awareness of the poor state of our world’s soils and how compost can enrich them. It is also partly due to growing interest in closing the loop on biodegradable goods and ensuring that at the end of their utility they can be broken down and made useful again as compost.

Recyclability

Choosing products and packaging that are recyclable is important, especially for those that cannot be reused, repaired or composted. One element that is worth noting is whether the material in question is infinitely recyclable and does not degrade with each processing (as with glass or most metals), or whether recycling is finite and results in lesser quality materials (as with paper and most plastics).

Refillability

It is definitely worth looking into brands that offer professional level products on refill. More and more bodycare, skincare, make-up and haircare brands have been introducing refillable options in recent years.

Energy conversion

Simply put, burning stuff creates energy. In an industrial process this involves incinerating waste at very high temperatures. The process releases heat which can be used for pretty much exactly that: heating homes and other interior spaces, or for electricity. When hazardous material is burned it becomes concentrated into ash and this can then be buried. Non-hazardous incinerated material that becomes ash can be put to work as aggregate or other building materials.

The beauty about waste-to-energy incineration is that while helping to reduce the volume of trash we produce, the process can also begin to pay for itself as the electricity it generates is sold. The drawbacks are that good, clean facilities are incredibly expensive to build, especially those that are effective at capturing the pollutants released in the process, and that it can actually encourage waste production (but that is a whole other blog!)

This article was written for Green Salon Collective by MeetthefiveRs.

Click on the following links to visit Green Salon Collective’s website, Facebook and Instagram accounts and learn about the solutions it offers for your salon.