Your salon probably handles a lot of chemicals which you are using for colouring and lightening and treating hair. But not all of what you squeeze from a tube makes it to your clients’ head and so you are left with excess. It is likely that much of your excess chemicals end up with the rest of your general waste but this can put unnecessary pressure on British and Irish landfill sites. It might also be the case that excess chemicals get washed down your salon drains but there are a number of reasons why this is also not a good disposal option.
Salon chemicals can be incredibly problematic for both people and the environment so it is important to make sure it gets disposed of properly. Read our article Chemicals: Human and Planetary Health to understand why. There are a number of ways your business can minimise the negative impacts of salon chemicals and we make some recommendations for using them more wisely in our article, How to become a chemicals-wise salon.
Green Salon Collective provides designated bins for your excess chemicals. All of the substances in these containers, as well as that in the PPE containers and anything else we find in your other containers that cannot be recycled, will be used to generate electricity for the UK National Grid.
We have partnered with a local business, First Mile, to ensure your salon’s chemical waste is brought to a specialist facility that burns it to ash. The incineration process produces heat and electricity and the ash is used for aggregate and other building materials. Hazardous waste such as that containing chemicals is burned according to the Offensive Waste guidelines.
No chemicals are ever sent to landfill or end up polluting our waterways.
This article was written for Green Salon Collective by MeetthefiveRs
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References and further reading
Green Salon Collective’s article, Waste to energy
Womansvoices.org article, Toxic chemicals in salon products: What salon workers need to know
Simply Organic Beauty’s video, 5 harmful chemicals to avoid in hair salons
The Guardian’s article, Hairdressers of the world unite against hidden dangers of the salon
Journal of Cosmetic Science article, Comparison of damage to human hair fibers caused by monoethanolamine- and ammonia-based hair colorants
Cover photo by Jack B on Unsplash