The ever-increasing and rapid growth of the beauty industry is one several experts have anticipated. Within the UK, the industry is expected to expand further with a compound annual growth rate of 2% from 2021 to 2026. However, this means that the impact of the beauty industry on the environment will also increase. If you run a beauty business, it’s helpful to identify specific elements with your business processes that could potentially cause harmful effects on the environment.
After this assessment, you can then decide the right steps to take to implement sustainability into your business process. Here are some eco-friendly strategies you can utilise within your beauty business to point you in the right direction
1. Find Alternatives to Plastic
Plastic is one of the biggest problems in protecting the environment from further harm. This is because most plastic items are made from fossil fuel-based chemicals. These harmful chemicals can be released into the earth, making it difficult to use the land profitably or access clean water. Additionally, plastic pollution has altered the living conditions of organisms within an ecosystem, including humans. To promote sustainability, you must cut out all plastics from your business. It is more advisable to opt for more eco-friendly options when the need to use plastic arises.
2. Implement Sustainable Manufacturing Practices
Over the years, the beauty industry has gained a reputation for adopting unhealthy and unsustainable manufacturing practices. Ensuring your business doesn’t fall into this stereotype boosts your efforts to protect the environment and makes you more attractive to your target audience. Sustainable manufacturing strategies are those that ensure the creation of products without wasting natural resources, generating pollution, and causing financial or physical harm to employees and the community at large. You should avoid using synthetic ingredients but rather ensure the responsible sourcing of various ingredients.
This is where ethical sourcing comes in. If your business practises ethical sourcing, it means it ensures that the materials used in the production or manufacturing process are obtained through sustainable and responsible methods. For instance, if you own a lipgloss production company, ethical sourcing would ensure that the ingredients used were ethically grown, cultivated, harvested, and distributed. Using local and organic ingredients in your manufacturing process is also recommendable and sustainable. In addition to cutting down on costs and supporting local businesses, doing this would also help you reduce your contributions to the emission of greenhouse gases.
Using renewable energy is another factor to include in your efforts to implement sustainable manufacturing practices. During manufacturing, large volumes of energy are consumed to produce a few items. This means large quantities of fossil fuel are being burnt. This increases your energy bills and causes further environmental damage and harm. You can fix this by exploring various renewable energy options, as they produce energy from natural resources and are constantly being replenished. Some examples of renewable energy include solar energy, wind energy, biomass energy, and hydro energy.
3. Reuse and Recycle
Reuse and recycling is a sustainability strategy that has been around for a while and is still as effective. On the one hand, reusing is the process of repurposing products and items to prolong their use. On the other hand, recycling involves collecting various items to create something entirely new and reprocessing them to be used as something else. However, the efforts you may make to reuse and recycle items would depend on the form of area you’re focused on within the industry.
For example, if you manufacture skincare products, you may encourage your clients to return their empty items, which you can recycle to produce more packages for your items. Therefore, you should explore the forms of waste your business produces to determine if you should reuse or recycle.
4. Build Like-Minded Partnerships
Imagine you’re running a sustainable beauty business, but your supplier doesn’t share the same ideals as you concerning sustainability. It is safe to say that issues concerning the quality of ingredients and other components supplied would constantly strain your relationship. In some cases, these components may taint your sustainability efforts. This is why you need to build like-minded, sustainable partnerships.
A sustainable partnership is one that brings together two or more companies together to assist each other in their efforts to achieve their sustainability goals. To ensure that your partnerships are indeed sustainable and successful, you should have some factors in mind, for you should identify the reasons to collaborate. Suppose you want to partner with a charity focused on environmental issues.
By identifying the need for collaboration with them, you ensure they are equipped to help you achieve your goals and you can be of help to them. Other factors to consider include aligning interests, goals, and vision for partnership, creating a strategy, and letting go of unsuccessful partnerships.
5. Move Your Business Online
Today, businesses are moving online to reach a wider range of target audiences for a more affordable price. Additionally, it offers your customers convenience, making their business experience delightful. For example, the implementation of chat software for business makes it easier for your customers to communicate with your business on assistance and issues they may have. But how would moving your business online help your efforts to be sustainable?
First, it helps reduce your carbon footprint. Your carbon footprints are the amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, you produce from various activities. When you have an in-person store, you increase your carbon footprint by driving to the location and increasing energy consumption. Moving your business operations online also requires fewer resources, preventing waste.
6. Go Paperless
Another problem that usually arises when sustainability is involved is paper. Research shows that Brits use up to 12.5 million tons of paper every year! This means more trees would be felled to simply keep up with the paper needs of citizens, which is not good for the environment. By taking the paperless route, you can ensure your business does not participate in this problem. Thanks to technology, previous aspects that may have required lots of paper can be done using a tool.
For instance, you may want to keep a diary to book appointments with your clients. However, you can use a better approach by implementing features on your website to make it easier for customers to book their appointments. In addition to saving the environment, going paperless would help you save money and space, and boost security, to mention a few advantages.
7. Choose Eco-Friendly Packaging Options
One way the beauty industry processes waste is through its packaging. In several cases, once the item has been taken out, the customer has no choice but to dispose of the packaging. In order to make your beauty business more sustainable, you must consider eco-friendly options. One strategy to consider is investing in biodegradable solutions to create your packaging. This way, should the packaging be tossed out, it would do the environment more good than harm. The second strategy is to implement plastic-free packaging.
As mentioned above, plastic is a major concern when discussing sustainability. It would be best if you also considered designing your packages in such a way that customers can repurpose and reuse them. This would reduce the waste produced significantly. When thinking of sustainable packaging options, there are several factors you should consider to guide you in making a decision. For example, you should consider if the materials used are safe for the community and if they are capable of being recycled.
8. Update Your Policies
No matter the size of your business, creating and implementing policies is important. A business policy helps increase efficiency and productivity as it spells out expected behaviour from various roles within the company. Therefore, a business’s sustainability policy would be the blueprint it is expected to follow to ensure it fulfils its commitment to implementing environmentally-friendly measures. By creating such a policy, you can adequately incorporate sustainability practices into the leadership of your company, which would trickle down to subordinates.
These policies also help you identify the strengths and weaknesses in the company’s existing sustainability efforts. Another advantage of creating sustainability policies for your business is that you ensure compliance with the law, as there are some provisions that businesses are required to adhere to. Additionally, creating and implementing such a policy would make your business more attractive to investors.
For your policies to be effective, it is important that each clause is clear and concise. Readers should understand what is required to ensure that activities are carried out as expected. As a business owner, you must ensure that these policies are communicated to staff and that their feedback is considered. This is because for your employees to follow the policy, they must value it, and this would most likely happen if they feel that they are a part of the process and are being heard.
Taking the decision to implement more sustainable measures in your beauty business is a great step in the right direction. Although it can be a bit confusing, the tips outlined should be of great help. However, you should also do further research to gain more information on strategies that would be helpful to your business and watch it grow.