L’Oréal’s corporate sustainability commitment, Sharing Beauty with All, is focused on innovating, producing, living and developing sustainably.  One part of that program is Garnier’s Personal Care and Beauty Brigade. The brand formed a partnership with TerraCycle, a specialist in making consumer products from post-consumer materials. Last year, Garnier and TerraCycle transformed over 1,500 pounds of recycled personal care waste into a one-of-a-kind Garnier Green Garden in New York City.  This year, the program is going national in an effort to create gardens for deserving communities. Each Garnier Green Garden will be made from 100% completely recycled materials. According to Lauren Taylor, US director of public relations for TerraCycle, the unique challenge that Garnier’s program presented was developing a solution for the entire personal care and beauty product category’s waste stream, not just waste from Garnier-branded products. TerraCycle had to create a recycling process that was not only robust enough to handle all sorts of personal care and beauty product residue, but also versatile enough to accept the packaging from hundreds of different products—all while keeping it economically feasible for TerraCycle and Garnier. “Luckily, the ‘easy’ to recycle components of the program are indeed the most common,” she said. About 70% of the products collected in this waste stream are either #1 (PET) or #2 (PE, HDPE) plastic. This category contains primarily the personal care portion of the program—bottles and jars for shampoos, conditioners, lotions, body washes, and miscellaneous hair and skin products. It’s the beauty portion of the program that makes the program more difficult. This category contains either #5 (PP) plastics, or “other,” which includes cardboard/paper, #6 or #7 plastics, cosmetic residue, cosmetic brushes and applicators, and other miscellaneous cosmetic products. This portion is most difficult because it requires additional separation, cleaning and processing steps in the recycling process, which is why this category is not accepted by municipal recycling systems, according to Taylor. The Green Garden project isn’t Garnier’s sole answer to reducing packaging waste. It uses 30-50% PCR PET in all of its bottles. - See more at: http://www.happi.com/issues/2014-05-02/view_features/winning-packagingmore-or-less/#sthash.0tAb7CNG.dpuf