Sustainable Salons Australia (SSA), a program to divert 95% of the waste generated in hair salons from landfill, is proving to be a valuable marketing tool for businesses that sign up.
SSA provides salons with a “swap and go” multi-bin system that collects about 95% of all waste for recycling, including colour tubes, chemical wastes and also hair, which comprises around 11% of salon waste.
Ponytails are being donated to a children’s alopecia charity, 80% of the shorter waste hair will be used to manufacture hair booms for mopping up oil spills and 20% is being used in community gardening and food growing projects.
Hair is an amazing absorbent for oil. The making of hair booms has been going on for 15 years in America, with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of hair collected for them. The hair booms that are going to be made in Australia will be made by TAFE hairdressing students, and the aim is to have a stockpile to protect the Great Barrier Reef in event of an oil spill.
A study of salon waste that showed aluminium foil comprised about 50% of waste. This led to an initiative called Refoil, which was launched three years ago to support salons in directing foil products to recycling, with 150 salons around the country participating to date. The initiative is saving about 1.7t of aluminium from going to landfill a year. If every salon in Australia started recycling its foil, it could be as much as 1,000t of aluminium a year being recovered.
Since SSA officially launched, 20 salons have already signed up to the program with 80 more applications in progress. The cost to the salon is based on the average number of customers a week and number of waste streams, and works out to be about $1.82 per customer if the full 95% waste is being collected and recycled.
The feedback from salons has been that when they tell clients, clients tell their friends about the sustainability initiatives and their friends then start coming to the salon themselves.
Re-post ~ Cutting the waste in hair salons | The Fifth Estate
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