Making beauty sustainable

Green Circle Salons offers sustainable solution to beauty industry with help from UPS
Making beauty sustainable Making beauty sustainable Making beauty sustainable

Green Circle Salons is the world’s first sustainable solution dedicated to recycling, recovering and repurposing used beauty products from salons and spas.

As they say, “We help keep people and the planet beautiful.”

Green and brown, as it turns out, are beautifully paired for the color wheel and the environment. Green Circle Salons ships exclusively with UPS, and UPS provides Green Circle with eco-friendly options.

“Our commitment is to support the beauty industry with the recovery of used products; things like hair clippings, foils, tubes,” said Will Simpson, Green Circle’s global corporate relationship manager. “For us, carbon neutrality is a big part of what we do, ensuring carbon offsets are always at the heart of our business so we can run a totally carbon neutral operation. UPS has been committed to supporting our efforts.”

The process is simple. Partner salons ship previously unrecoverable materials and hard-to-recycle items to Green Circle, and they recycle, recover and repurpose the materials.

UPS is the conduit and carbon neutral shipping closes the loop. Considering the beauty industry creates 877 pounds of used products every minute, it’s a huge loop to close.

Watch Green Circle Salon's short video to see how they make beauty beautiful.

UPS’s evolving role

Penny Naas, UPS president of international public affairs and sustainability, adds context on UPS’s role in sustainability:

“It’s in our engineering DNA,” Penny said. “As a company, we’ve always been extremely focused on efficiencies. For a lot of companies sustainability is born not only out of a desire to do good by the environment but also out of a desire to be the most efficient company you can be … eliminating used products.”

“We think the solution on sustainability probably still hasn’t been invented yet … we’re on a journey to full electrification and using renewable fuels to fuel it. We’re using bridging technologies, bridging solutions, to get us to that world of tomorrow. Carbon neutral shipping gets us part way there. While it’s not where we think we will be as a company or a society at the end of the day, it’s the right solution for today.”

Behind the scenes

UPS works with customers like Green Circle to track all their shipments and quantify environmental impact.

“We have a team of people who calculate how much carbon is emitted by each package,” Penny said. “We select a variety of carbon neutral projects that are verified by the gold standard certification process to be projects where we’re taking carbon out and replacing it with an offset.”

As technology and UPS’s commitment to alternative fuels advances, even greener days are ahead for UPS and customers like Green Circle Salons.

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