The Whitman Green Team’s Monthly “Down-to-Earth” Blog Post:
I recently conducted an inspection of a warehouse for a company that manufactures cosmetics bottles. The company creates specialty bottle-ware and specialty lines and brings them to worldwide trade shows to sell to major cosmetics companies. So, the next time you purchase cosmetics at Target or Macy’s, chances are the bottles behind the counter or on the shelves were made by one of our client’s tenants!
The warehouse manager was telling me about their company’s green initiatives that have been installed over the last 5 years. One specifically centered around perfume and hand soap bottle recycling. Plastic perfume and hand soap bottles used to be manufactured with a metal pump. Since this metal piece was not recyclable, the entire plastic bottle had to be thrown in the regular garbage. Given the volume of plastic bottle-ware that was manufactured, most of which was never used, just showcased as potential options for major players in the industry, they realized the amount of plastic waste was a problem. As a result, they now manufacture all perfume bottles and hand soap bottles with plastic pumps instead of metal as part of their ‘metal-free’ initiative. As a result, these products are fully recyclable, and the company has greatly reduced their plastic waste.
To give you an idea of the volume of plastic no longer going into a regular waste stream, when I was at the warehouse, there were over 10,000 perfume and hand soap bottles. This was just for 1 round of trade shows in this country alone. Rather than having to throw out their unused bottle-ware, creating the need for more unnecessary plastic production, their plastic bottle-ware can now be repurposed.
Written by:
Brett Iwicki
Project Manager
Posted on April 10th, 2024
