Key Takeaways:
Every year, 120 billion packages of beauty and wellness products are produced, with 95% of cosmetic packaging typically thrown away.
This America Recycles Day (November 15), Sephora is celebrating a major milestone: more than 100,000 pounds of empty beauty packaging have been collected through its Beauty (Re)Purposed take-back program. This is equivalent to nearly 6,000 shopping carts filled with empties.
The program launched in 2023 across Sephora stores in the US and Canada in partnership with Pact Collective. Beauty (Re)Purposed was created to address one of the industry’s biggest challenges: waste. Packaging often doesn’t get recycled because it is too small, made from mixed materials, or it's unlabeled, making it incompatible with most municipal recycling systems.
Designed to make responsible disposal more simple and accessible, Beauty (Re)Purposed allows consumers to drop off their empty beauty packaging, regardless of brand or where the product was purchased. The program follows three steps. First, ensure packaging is clean, unbagged, and free of liquid or residue; then, bring empties to any participating Sephora in the US or Canada and place them in the dedicated Pact collection bin; and once collected, the packaging is sorted, processed, and transformed into new materials.
That’s when Pact Collective takes over. The nonprofit works to unite the beauty and wellness industries to reduce packaging waste and enable more circular systems. Pact focuses on three key pillars: uniting brands to take responsibility for packaging waste, closing the loop through collection programs for hard-to-recycle materials, and educating the industry on how to design better packaging.
Pact works to ensure the highest and best use of collected materials by following a hierarchy from most to least ideal. At the top is upcycling, in which materials are turned into new packaging or products of equal value; next is downcycling, where packaging is converted into lower-value products like pallets or flowerpots; then molecular recycling, which breaks materials down into chemical building blocks; and finally waste-to-energy or waste-to-concrete, where materials are used for electricity generation or industrial applications when no other processing is possible.
In partnering with Pact Collective, which is also part of the U.S. Plastics Pact’s Roadmap 2.0, Sephora is helping support broader industry goals for 2030, including reducing virgin plastic use, scaling reusable systems, and designing packaging that is recyclable, reusable, or compostable.
Sephora’s collaboration with Pact not only addresses beauty’s recycling problem, but also aligns with the larger changes the industry is targeting by giving customers a more practical way to make a positive impact.
