Did you know that the beauty industry alone is responsible for over 120 billon units of waste every year? It is the top offender for creating plastic waste and sadly, most of it is not recyclable, ending up in landfills. 

The Emma Lewisham Beauty Circle is a fundamental part of the business and we encourage all our customers and retailer partners to participate. By purchasing a refillable pod instead of a full product again, you are reducing up to 70% in carbon emissions, energy use by 60% and water use by 40% as well as helping to reduce the billions of units of beauty waste that end up in landfill every year. 

This is an incredible saving to help our planet. Everything that is taken back by our Beauty Circle programme is put back into the cycle of our packaging to be sterilized and remade into new Emma Lewisham product packaging. We believe in taking ownership and responsibility for everything we produce, with all our products designed to be circular. 

We believe refills should always come before recycling. Recycling really is the end of the line - the last step. At Emma Lewisham we want to ensure that any product component that can be reused, will be reused. Any aspect of the packaging that cannot be recycled is sent off to specialised recycler, Terracycle to be correctly recycled. A lot of people don't realise that most beauty containers are not able to be curb side recycled due to its complexity. We pour a huge ammount of investment into Terracyle to ensure all packaging is dealt with correctly. This then goes on to be made into incredible things like Childrens playgrounds. 

We need to move away from the old model of take, make, waste (bringing virgin materials in every time) to a circular model of reduce, reuse, recycle. 

How the Beauty Circle Works: 

When a customer is finished with their Emma Lewisham product, we ask that it is washed out with water and returned to store. From there, we keep a box of returned containers. After about a month, or when the box is filled up, we Emma Lewisham sends a Beauty Circle return label to us to return the empty containers to them to continue the circle. These collections are reduced to monthly or less often to keep our carbon emissions down.

To learn more about the great work Emma Lewisham is doing around sustainability view their website at emmalewisham.com/pages/sustainability