Sustainability

It’s a big word that we don’t take lightly. We’ve made a few big changes here at A bit Hippy, towards greater environmental sustainability for our skincare products from the packaging containing our product, better ways to recycle our packaging for our customers, committing and sticking to local manufacturing and the packaging that goes into shipping our products.

We admit, there is still a way to go and we will continue to get our sh*t together and keep up with innovations that we can apply to our industry.

Packaging Materials

  • When recycling products, labels go through a process to get removed so you don’t need to take them off. But not all labels are made equal. We chose stone paper labels, which are really made from ground stone. This reduces our reliance on cutting down trees for paper labels and in turn is better for the environment.

  • We’ve reduced the amount of plastic in our lids by switching a portion of the lid to bamboo. The plastic inside the bamboo lid is sugarcane plastic. Unfortunately a recyclable pump does not exist because they cost too much for our council programs to pull them apart and recycle each bit.

  • In the skincare industry some products need special tubes. We’ve managed to change all of our plastic tubes over to plastic made from sugarcane, reducing the carbon footprint of manufacturing. Only our sunscreen is still in a special layered tube, while we run some longer term stability test to ensure the tube can handle the sunscreen product.

  • Some of our smaller products come in boxes. While we keep our packaging minimal, sometimes a box is necessary to include information that’s required by legislation that won’t fit on the small product packaging. So we made sure we used recycled paper when choosing a box type, this can be recycled again in your recycling bin.

  • Our bottles are totally recyclable and made with plastic that would have otherwise gone into landfill. While there is great debate against plastic and for glass, we weighed up the pros and cons based on the recyclability in Australia and carbon footprint of production. We’re plastic for now and these can be recycled in your yellow bin. You can read more about why we chose to stay with plastic bottles on the blog.

  • You’ll notice our Dry shampoo has been changed from a plastic powder bottle to a cardboard tube with a paper sifter. This is completely biodegradable and easily recyclable… simple, it’s paper. But like we said all options have a downside… just don’t get it wet cause we haven’t coated it with anything to ensure it will biodegrade or can be recycled. When we changed this packaging we also decided to make it bigger, one reason was because we were going through a bottle too quickly and another is that being paper you can lose a little puff here and there when opening, especially if you don’t store it upright.

  • We love supporting our local community. So we only work with small family owned businesses to manufacture our skincare formulations. Yep that’s right, our products are all made and bottled right here in Australia (NSW, QLD and WA) reducing our carbon footprint compared to other skincare brands while boosting our local economy.

  • All of the packaging we use to ship our products to your door are recyclable and many are made from recycled materials. We make sure your products aren’t damaged by using recycled brown paper, we put these into recycled cardboard boxes with minimal printing, include a little love note on recycled paper and tape it all up with recyclable paper tape that you don’t even need to take off the box when recycling because it is so smart it doesn’t disrupt the recycling process.

Future Sustainability Goals

AbH-Social-037_b74f4d66-6846-4466-aa0a-1bd0dff0b7ba.jpg

We’re well aware that recycling is just part of the battle and we know there is still a way to go. Now we’ve levelled up on our recycling efforts, it’s time to improve our processes to reduce and reuse!

A few things we're working on:

Sustainable refill options. So you can reuse your uber-cute A bit Hippy packaging time and time again.

A further reduction of our carbon footprint with a goal to make this measurable within 3 years.

Provide customers with an opportunity to reuse their existing pumps when ordering a 500ml pump bottle.

Add more paper packaging options to our range for products like Deodorant and Lip Balm.

Got a mighty fine idea? Let us know!