Herbal Essences and Terracycle are delivering on their Spring commitment to give back to nature through their Renew the Forest initiative.

This fall, the hair care product brand and international waste management company will donate 20 park benches made from recycled hair care packaging and plant 61,329 trees throughout the U.S. in partnership with The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees reforestation campaign.

The benches, upcycled from bottles collected through the ongoing Herbal Essences Recycling Program, will be installed in the Independence Lake Preserve in California, the Edge of Appalachia Preserve System in Ohio, and the Morgan Swamp Preserve in Ohio.

Turning beach plastic into trees

In celebration of Earth month in April 2021, Herbal Essences pledged to plant one tree for every two bottles of select bio:renew shampoo or conditioner purchased at Walmart in the U.S.  The initiative sought to seed eco-awareness among consumers and surpassed its 58,000-tree goal, Herbal Essences parent-company Procter & Gamble announced in a statement.

“We are proud to partner with TerraCycle and The Nature Conservancy to carry out business practices that directly enhance natural environments for communities to enjoy,” said Rachel Zipperian, senior scientist at Herbal Essences, noting that “plants underpin all life on Earth, and tangible renewal is necessary to sustain biodiversity.”

The bio:renew bottles themselves are a product of a 2019 Herbal Essences and TerraCycle partnership to create the hair care brand’s first recyclable shampoo and conditioner packaging made from beach plastic.

“Part of Herbal Essences’ bio:renew collection, these innovative bottles helped demonstrate the potential of some of our most mismanaged resources, like plastics collected from beaches, and demonstrate its inherent value,” TerraCycle CEO and Founder Tom Szaky told Cosmetics Design-USA.

Innovative collaboration and actionable sustainability

Despite the growing recycling and reuse movement in the personal care industry, Szaky notes that: “More innovative collaborations and actionable sustainability commitments from brands across the beauty industry are needed to make the largest impact possible in the time we have left.”

Initiatives like Renew the Forest take waste management a step further by giving back to nature and educating community about the journey of waste along the supply chain.  Szaky says that it is these types of partnerships that are making “it simple to be a protector of the planet and to help preserve the natural beauty of the environment for future generations.”

Since its beginnings in 2001, Terracyle has also teamed with Garnier to build community gardens, Colgate to donate recycled plastic playgrounds to schools, Bausch + Lomb to convert contact lens materials into custom training modules for the Guide Dog Foundation, and Gillette, CVS and Fisher House Foundation to recycle razors into a playground for a military medical center.