Plastic is all over the place. It’s within the deep ocean, the Arctic, our tap water and our lungs. It’s a crisis. To tackle the issue, some brands have began using recycled plastic or ‘ocean-bound’ plastic packaging. However the thing is, it’s still plastic, and it could possibly only be recycled two to thrice before the standard degrades and it becomes waste yet again. Spotting the flaw on this plan, beauty brands are increasingly directing their resources toward finding another option, specializing in compostable materials like seaweed, wood pulp and corn.

Brands and manufacturers including Plus, On Repeat, United and Free, Ethique and April all have compostable materials of their line-ups and Haeckels is the newest to affix the fray. The Margate-based skincare brand desires to inhabit a “post-plastic beauty world” and is reintroducing itself under 4 latest pillars – Haeckels Skin, Haeckels Home, Haeckels Fragrance, and Haeckels Lab – with the previous packaged entirely in Vivomer. The natural, vegan material, which is made with the assistance of microbes, feels and appears like plastic however it’s completely home compostable.  

Beauty consumers will likely have seen marketing for each ‘compostable’ and ‘biodegradable’ packaging, and it’s necessary to grasp the difference between the 2 as they’re often conflated. Biodegradable materials may be broken down within the natural environment but there are not any deadlines on how long it could possibly or should take, while compostable materials require specific conditions and are subject to time scales for decomposition. Essentially, all compostable materials are biodegradable, but not all biodegradable materials are compostable.

As brands seek to stem the flow of plastic pollution, packaging products in a cloth that can return to nature fairly than destroy and suffocate it looks like the plain selection, but is compostable packaging too good to be true?

On Repeat’s refill pouches break down in compost in 34 weeks, April’s packaging is certified for home composting and breaks down in roughly six months, while Haeckels’ Vivomer packaging has been independently tested in all environments and can “contribute to the biosphere in as little as 48 weeks”. 

But brands’ claims of their materials being compostable should at all times be treated with caution. Some products may be composted in a compost heap at home (indicated by certifications like OK compost HOME), while others should be sent to an industrial composting facility because they require a mix of very high temperatures, high humidity and oxygen to interrupt down. The difficulty is, there just aren’t enough industrial composting facilities to process compostable packaging at scale. So, a brand can say its materials are technically compostable, however it simply cannot guarantee they’ll actually be composted, defeating the thing entirely. 

“Understandably, brands and designers have jumped at the possibility to make use of ‘compostable’ materials for his or her products,” says Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet. “But there may be a quite simple query to ask originally of the design process: does it help get food and organic garden waste into our composting system? If the reply isn’t any, then it probably is the mistaken use.” In truth, in A Plastic Planet’s report, The Compostable Conundrum, personal care and cosmetic packaging are on the red list, with the usage of compostable materials not really useful because they don’t help carry food waste into the food waste system and feed healthy soil.

“We’d like to look beyond straight swaps from plastic to compostable materials to systems that avoid single-use entirely,” continues Sutherland. Haeckels hasn’t transitioned to compostable packaging wholesale. Its Home and Fragrance lines, as an example, will use an updated style of glassware because the brand found its customers were more prone to refill and reuse glass packaging in those situations. The choice to maintain the glass in some instances and use Vivomer for Skin was based on a business-wide impact report which weighed up aspects like waste and carbon emissions.

“We’re champions of latest materials, so I feel it was at all times expected that we might move into compostable packaging, but there’s loads of compostability noises on the market, so we have now been very focused on testing, testing, testing. All our compostability claims have been checked by an organization called Provenance. It’s all legit,” says Charlie Vickery, managing director of Haeckels, adding that the corporate checked out the packaging like a twig within the sense that regardless of where it finally ends up, it might at all times turn into food sources and contribute to the soil. 

April sends its complement refills in NatureFlex, a compostable material created from wood pulp, and the choice got here right down to making the simplest swap for its audience. “We consider that our compostable refill pouch is a convenient solution that makes it easy for the client to make a sustainable selection,” says Helena Aru, growth director at April. The brand considers it a greater option than a refill and return scheme because it involves less effort for the patron, subsequently making behaviour change easier. “We don’t know beforehand exactly where our customers live or in the event that they would drive a automobile to drop off the empty jars, so it might give us less control and make it harder to calculate our total impact,” Aru continues.

Calculating impact and knowing the facts is certainly so as in terms of ensuring materials do what they’re promised to do. Dr Imogen Napper, a marine conservationist with a PhD in Marine Pollution, put compostable and biodegradable carrier bags to the test and located that while the compostable bag she tested disappeared completely after three months in a marine environment, it was still present within the soil 27 months after being buried. 

Plus, which uses home compostable pouches and mailers says its goal in designing compostable packaging is to “help advocate for making composting mainstream” and signposts its audience towards a pre-written letter to send to government representatives. Applying pressure to step-up composting is crucial, in spite of everything, the higher the infrastructure, the higher the efficiency of composting. Nevertheless it’s necessary that brands don’t flood the system with ‘compostable’ materials when there aren’t sufficient facilities to cope with them because it is going to find yourself being extracted from the waste stream like every other plastic then incinerated or landfilled.

Brands moving away from plastic and using materials that actively give back to the environment is positive in an industry predicated on waste, but a healthy dose of scepticism will come in useful if we’re going to be sure ‘compostable’ doesn’t turn into the following greenwashing buzzword. Compostable is great, in the proper context and if it actually becomes compost, otherwise it’s only a smokescreen or, as Sutherland puts it, “a diversionary sticking plaster on the trail of real change.”