I'm at the salon (美发厅) and my hairdresser Kristi Lauren is talking rubbish. To be precise, she's telling me exactly how much waste her salon recycles: last year it was 125 tonnes. Everything from hair to shampoo (洗发水) bottles is recycled in innovative ways. Her waste is collected by Waste Free Systems, a social enterprise.
Lauren explains the problem, "Our colour tubes are boxed, and they can have a paper ingredient (成分) list as well as the plastic cover and the metal tube. All our product bottles. Then there's all that cut hair, and the unused colour that would normally be washed down the sink."
Waste Free Systems charges a fee for collecting the waste, and money raised by selling recycled materials goes to charities: Lauren, who runs an eight-chair salon, says, "It's a small price to pay. It ends up being just about $2 per client － we call it a green tax."
Paul Frasca is the co-founder of Sustainable Salons, a similar service which now works with almost 1,000 hairdressing salons and beauty salons across Australia and New Zealand. Frasca says many salons are now using their green programs actively as a marketing strategy. "The environmentally aware consumer is now the most important customer on the market. So it doesn't just make environmental sense."
Both programs are researching new ways to redirect waste. Waste Free Systems is using hair to provide nutrients for plants, while Sustainable Salons makes hair products for cleaning up oil leakage. Sustainable Salons has partnered with Dresden Vision to turn plastic shampoo bottles into frames (框架) for eyeglasses. Waste Free Systems has experimented with turning plastic bottles into 3D printing material.
