Don’t Fall Victim To Hair Industry Greenwashing—Read This First

What Is Greenwashing In The Hair Industry? Everything You Should Know

When stocking your retail shelves and backbar, you’ve likely seen hair brands throw around buzzwords like “sustainably-packaged” and “sustainably sourced” without explaining what they actually mean. This is known as greenwashing—a marketing tactic brands use to exaggerate the impact of their sustainability practices. But now, as clients become increasingly more aware of their own environmental footprint, brands are trading in the greenwashing terms for total transparency about how eco-friendly their products truly are. 

Ahead, we’re sharing everything to know about a packaging’s life cycle to ensure it is in fact sustainable before and after you use it.

How To Identify If A Product Is ACTUALLY Sustainably Sourced:

The first step in implementing sustainable practices in your salon is knowing where your products are coming from. Sustainability requires transparency from the beginning of a product’s life to the end. The hair wellness brand Malibu C works with REPREVE® to package their EcoBlu® liter and 9oz. shampoos and conditioners in eco-friendly packaging.

Here’s more information about their straightforward, transparent approach to sustainability:

• REPREVE® sources post-consumer recycled plastic and ocean-bound plastic, cleans it, turns it into flakes and then into resin.
• That resin is embedded with FiberPrint®, a proprietary tracer technology. This means when a product is made from REPREVE®, you can verify its origins because it uses traceable and transparent U TRUST™ verification.
• Malibu C now uses the new EcoBlu® bottles that are made from this recycled, traceable resin.
• The bottles are made with 49 percent REPREVE® Our Ocean® ocean-bound plastics and 49 percent REPREVE® post-consumer recycled plastics. Meaning, they are made from 98 percent recycled materials. They can also be recycled again after use.

Photo courtesy of Malibu C

Photo courtesy of Malibu C

How To Identify If A Package Is Biodegradable:

Now that you know how to tell if a product’s packaging is sustainable before you buy it, it’s just as important to know the impact it’ll have on the environment after you throw it out—AKA the end of life of a product. Traditional plastic packaging takes centuries to degrade, but Malibu C’s independent ASTM D5511 tests that represent biologically active landfills on representative packages have shown 60.6% biodegradation in 388 days for their EcoBlu® bottles.

This means, while traditional plastic packaging takes tens of hundreds of years to decompose, Malibu C’s EcoBlu® bottles take much less time. This is because the brand uses Eco-One® technology in its plastics to speed up the biodegradation process. Eco-One® allows treated plastic to be consumed (as a food energy source) by the microbes in biologically active landfills. So essentially, the landfill will consume the bottles quickly in a way that is safe for the earth.

Learn more about Malibu C’s biodegradation practices here:

Why Transparency In Sustainability Is Key:

As clients become more aware of their own environmental impact, they want to buy and use products that adhere to those values. Malibu C is the only U.S. hair brand to combine both REPREVE® and Eco-One® technology, making it a leader in transparency and sustainability. When the two are combined, you can be confident the products you’re buying are eco-friendly before you buy them and long after you throw them out. 

Here are sustainably sourced essentials to offer in your salon:

• Hydrate Color Wellness® Collection
• Hard Water Wellness® Collection
• Scalp Wellness® Collection
• Malibu Blondes® Collection

Click here for even more products that will make your salon more sustainable.