The beauty industry has a problem: plastic. Billions and billions of pieces of it.
The industry’s myriad plastic containers may hold the secret to perfect skin, but those same vessels also end up in landfills and oceans. According to National Geographic, there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic sitting in the oceans alone, and current projections peg 12 billion metric tons of plastic to hit our landfills by 2050.
So, while we love the ceremony of unwrapping an exquisite beauty product, it’s time we rethink all that plastic (and all that cardboard and cellophane, while we’re at it). As it turns out, the Body Shop is doing exactly that.
On March 5, the Body Shop will unveil its first concept store in North America at Pacific Centre—marking its third globally after London and Hong Kong.
Image courtesy of the Body Shop.
The new shop expresses the brand’s activist DNA. After all, its founder, Anita Roddick, launched the company in 1976 with a goal of using ethically sourced, all-natural ingredients, and pioneered the movement against testing on animals.
Now with 3,000 stores worldwide, the chain beauty brand was awarded industry-leading B Corp certification in 2019, the gold star for companies that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance and public transparency.
In the Pacific Centre iteration, customers will now find a shower gel refill station offering refillable 250-millilitre aluminum bottles for customers to reload with shower gel favourites such as Pink Grapefruit, British Rose, and Shea.
In partnership with TerraCycle, the concept shop will also continue its Return. Recycle. Repeat. program to encourage shoppers to return their empty bottles, jars, tubs, tubes and pots in exchange for a future-purchase voucher.
Image courtesy of the Body Shop.
There’s also a water bottle refill station, along with thoughtful sustainable fixtures made from reclaimed wood, zinc façade cladding, and worktop surfaces manufactured from 100 per cent recycled material previously destined for the landfill—all to help minimize the Body Shop’s environmental footprint.
The overall goal is to get customers fully immersed in the process: playing with products, recycling, refilling, and campaigning for issues, including tackling the world’s plastics problem. Let’s call it clean skin, clean conscience.
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