Recycle Responsibly!

An estimated 120 billion beauty packages are made each year– most of them from virgin plastic, and most of them ending up in the landfill2. It's our responsibility as businesses & consumers to do better. You can now handle those hard-to-recycle items that won’t make it through curbside recycling with our Pact recycling program.

RECYCLE & SAVE 25%

1. https://www.zerowaste.com/zero-waste-home-guide/
2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/beauty-personal-care-industry-plastic

What Are Hard to Recycle Items?

To understand if your Apoterra packaging is considered a "hard-to-recycle" item, go to the item's product listing and look up the "How to Recycle Tab." For packaging from other brands, check out Pact's Takeback Guidelines Here

Your Options

Ship It

Mail in 5-10 clean empties from any brand and we'll return the favor with 25% off your next Apoterra Purchase

Drop It

Bring your clean empties in to a participating Pact drop off location. Email a picture of your empties next to the Pact drop off bin to info@apoterra.com & we'll send you a promo code for 25% off your next Apoterra Purchase

You pay the $5 shipping fee & you get 25% off your next order. Apoterra handles all collection + recycling fees.  

Accepted Materials & Packaging

Please continue to use curbside recycling for packages that are recycled through that system, it's still your most sustainable option! But because it's often too small, flexible and/or made of mixed materials, beauty packaging can be problematic for recycling facilities, and will often get filtered out for the incinerator. Here’s the breakdown of where your empties should go.

  • Plastic containers #1, 2 and 5 – when they are the size of a yogurt cup or larger. Plastic packages that are smaller than 2” on more that one side aren’t for curbside, but Pact can take them.
  • Clear or frosted glass jars and bottles
  • Stainless steel or aluminum 
  • Cardboard & paper 

What happens to your empties?

All empties get shipped to our partners at Pact, a nonprofit membership organization that collects hard-to-recycle beauty products and diverts them from the landfill, and works to make beauty packaging more sustainable. Once packaging is received by Pact, they sort everything by material type and aim to find the highest and best use for all materials (i.e. they prioritize getting it back into consumer packaging or durable goods over downcycling or chemical recycling).  Ideally, materials are sold back to beauty packaging manufacturers to close the loop in our industry (this is trickier than you might think).

However, some of the materials – like different plastic types that are not separable, or some “mystery” plastics that are not identified with resin codes – end up in “waste-to-energy” pile. This means they cannot be mechanically or chemically recycled or downcycled, and so they are incinerated. These are *not* the ideal end-use scenario, so we try to limit this. Packaging suppliers need to stop making packaging that can only be landfilled or incinerated.