Sinéad McLaughlin Explains Why Recycle My Salon has OSMO’s Support
In this episode of The Recycling Room podcast, Sinéad McLaughlin, senior brand manager for OSMO and OSMO IKON within Professional Beauty Systems, talks about sustainability in the hair & beauty supply industry.
Listen now (9 minutes)
[Sinéad McLaughlin]
My name is Sinéad McLaughlin and I'm the senior brand manager for OSMO and OSMO IKON, within Professional Beauty Systems. Professional Beauty Systems is based in Glasgow in the UK, manufacturing numerous brands for the professional hair and beauty sectors.
As a company and as a brand, we are very much looking towards adopting a sustainability approach across the business and the whole industry, which contributes a lot of general waste. Because we are producing in large quantities to a mass market, it’s something we really wanted to get involved in. The Recycle My Salon scheme stood out because of its focus on aluminium tubes. There are similar companies out there, but they're more generic.
Salons utilise huge volumes of aluminium tubes, even really small salons can go through between 100 and 200 tubes a month, so it's vast numbers we're talking about. I think historically there’s been a lack of awareness around the recyclability of aluminium colour tubes, with the difficulty being the need to clean out the product from inside the tube. I think it's just going to make such a big difference and it'll educate the salons on it as well. I think education probably is key to it, a lot of smaller salons may think "what benefit am I going to make? What impact is my contribution going to have? I'm just a little small salon" but if all of these small salons all get involved together then we are potentially going to see big changes.
I think we're definitely seeing improvements out there but I think there's still a long way to go, just in terms of people's knowledge of the effect that it's having and what they can do to help. I think there are a lot of salons that probably want to help but they're just not sure what contributions they can make. These small changes are going to lead to big differences. Just a simple thing of recycling the tubes that you're using every day, you put it in one bin as opposed to another bin and by doing that you are contributing to the bigger picture.
I think it's a lot of word of mouth, much of the time you see things through social media or you hear that somebody else down the road’s doing it and then you start talking about it. This is a low-cost system as well, it's not going to cost them much to get involved with it and everything's taken away for them so it's not going to have any impact on their everyday salon life. At the end of the day, they'll know that they're working towards more a sustainable salon lifestyle. Social media is one of those platforms that has made that a lot easier for companies, businesses and schemes like this. In a lot of ways before it was a bit harder to get the word out there. On social media you can break things down more, you can show it rather than telling it using simple little videos of showing them exactly step by step how to do it. Social media just makes things a lot easier and gets the word out to a bigger audience a lot quicker.
As a brand that's the approach that we're hoping to take as well, we have brand ambassadors who are all hairdressers and each have a big following behind them. So we're hoping to get them involved and have a kind of 'hints and tips' idea running on our social media, which will be their ideas of little things that they are doing that makes a difference, things like turning the temperature down on the tap or using cooler water, switching off their electrical items when they're not in use and using actual towels rather than these disposable towels, all these little things. It is taking a little bit of a step back to the things we all used to do, but it's those small things that can make the difference. We're hoping to utilise them and their knowledge and hopefully people can watch them and relate to them and be inspired by ideas that they may not have thought of themselves.
It's a cost-effective, sustainable and easy to use system that's not going to impact their daily life or take time out of their day, which is very important for a lot of salons.
I think we're definitely seeing a lot of changes. Certainly for us as a company, post COVID we're seeing a lot of new legislation in terms of recycling. At the moment we're updating all our artwork to include new recycling symbols. Previously it was one standard recycling symbol but now it's broken down and much more detailed on each specific product, so there'll be a recycling symbol for the bottle, another one for the cap, the pump and another for the label. It's very specific. This has been put in place by certain countries in Europe already as a legal requirement so everybody is definitely changing towards this. Also as a company, we're looking in terms of our packaging to move everything to PCR, including our packaging, labels and gift packs and boxes. We're trying to use recycled and sustainable materials as much as possible. So it's having an impact on everything we do across the business.
I think in general, probably following COVID, a lot of people are more aware of it and are open to change but I think there's still quite a lot to be done in terms of knowledge. I think it's time to educate them on what they can do to make that positive change. We can see it ourselves even just visually in social media, when you're scrolling through there are definitely signs that people are improving. We're getting a lot more requests as well for things like vegan products, sustainably sourced ingredients and things like that, so that's all positive. I mean, it's not going to happen overnight for us, but we are working towards it.
