Finishing a cleanser, serum, or moisturizer usually prompts you to immediately reach for a replacement. But once the bottle or tube is empty, what happens next?
Beauty packaging is a persistent waste challenge. The global beauty industry produces an estimated 120 billion units of packaging each year, with only 9% recycled. While consumers are often encouraged to be more mindful of what they buy, the question of what happens to packaging after use deserves just as much attention.
The Beauty Loop, our new beauty empties collection program in collaboration with Filipino skincare brand Habitude, offers a practical way to address that gap. Now open to the public at The Beauty Edit Gallery inside Spatio at Opus Mall, the program accepts empty beauty packaging from any brand and directs collected materials to designated recycling and waste recovery channels.
The initiative is built around more than collection. With Greencycle Innovative Solutions as its recycling and waste recovery partner, The Beauty Loop documents the weight and types of materials collected, along with how each material stream is processed or recovered.
Making Beauty Empties Easier to Return
For Habitude co-founders Nikki Santiago-Rivera, Romina Nañagas, and Noelle Hui, The Beauty Loop builds on years of sustainability advocacy, including their support for MAD Earth, formerly Make A Difference Travel.
The idea also came from a familiar experience within the beauty industry. After years of working as an editor, Santiago-Rivera had seen firsthand how quickly beauty packaging accumulates, particularly through press kits and product launches. It was a concern that resonated with The Beauty Edit, which has also explored packaging waste through its editorial coverage—specifically through the story The Wonderful (And Wasteful) World of PR.
“Years of receiving press kits as an editor and watching beautiful packaging pile up, I think a lot of us in the beauty industry have felt that guilt about where it all ends up,” says Santiago-Rivera. “The Beauty Loop is our attempt to do something real about it—a system and a habit the whole community can get behind.”
The Beauty Edit Gallery at Spatio serves as the program’s collection point, giving consumers a place to bring their empties while visiting the retail space.
“The Beauty Loop felt like a natural extension of what we’re building at The Beauty Edit—a space where Filipino beauty is taken seriously, in every sense,” says Nicole Morales, founder of The Beauty Edit. “We’re proud to give the program a home here, and we hope it becomes a habit for everyone who walks through these doors.”
For Spatio, the collaboration is also an opportunity to make sustainability part of the retail experience. “The Beauty Loop gives our visitors a habit worth building and a reminder that what we do with what we consume matters,” says Martin de Leon, deputy general manager of Spatio.
What Can You Drop Off?
The Beauty Loop accepts empty, rinsed, and dry beauty packaging from any brand. Accepted materials include:
- Plastic: Bottles and tubes from cleansers, toners, lotions, shampoos, conditioners, serums, and sunscreen.
- Glass: Bottles and jars from serums, perfumes, face creams, and toners.
- Paper and cardboard: Product boxes, outer cartons, and paper wrapping.
A visual guide is available at the collection bins, and staff can help answer questions about accepted materials. Visitors are also encouraged to scan the QR code at the collection point and complete a short registration form. Each registered visit is assigned a unique Beauty Loop reference ID, allowing the program to track participation over time.
Registration is an important part of the process. By recording visits alongside Greencycle’s collection reports, the program can build a clearer picture of how much packaging is being collected, which materials are being recovered, and where there may be room to improve. These records will contribute to The Beauty Loop’s impact reporting.
Where Does the Packaging Go?
Collecting empties is only one part of the process. What happens to them afterward depends on the material and the recovery method available.
Greencycle Innovative Solutions, a Philippine recycling and waste recovery company with three processing facilities in the country, handles the collected packaging and provides reports after each collection.
Rigid plastics such as high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) are processed into products including sacks and twine. Flexible plastics and other difficult-to-recycle materials are sent for co-processing at cement plants, where they serve as fuel substitutes. Glass goes to a partner facility for repurposing, while paper and cardboard are sent to a partner paper mill.
The reporting system documents the total weight collected, the material breakdown, and the recovery method used for each stream. This provides a clearer record of what happens after packaging leaves the collection point, rather than treating collection alone as the measure of impact.
Making Mindfulness Part of the Routine
We give plenty of thought to what goes on our skin, from the ingredients in our serums to the formulas we use every day, but the packaging left behind often gets less attention. The Beauty Loop offers a way to rethink that final step in our beauty routines, making it easier to return empty bottles, tubes, and jars instead of simply throwing them away. It’s a small change in habit, but one that invites us to be more conscious of the products we consume and the waste they leave behind.
For Santiago-Rivera, the hope is that returning empties will eventually feel as familiar as restocking a favorite cleanser or moisturizer. “We buy and use beauty products regularly, often as part of our everyday routines. We hope returning the empties becomes part of that routine,” she says. And perhaps that is where more mindful beauty consumption begins—not necessarily with a complete overhaul of our habits, but with a little more thought given to what happens after the last drop.
