But as new inventions lead to more and more shampoos relying on ingredients created in labs, we’re getting further and further away from what’s healthy and natural. In fact, the hair industry – both commercially and individually – has created a considerable carbon footprint over time.
We know that nourishing your scalp is so important. There are easy ways to take care of your scalp like using a scalp brush to stimulate blood flow and remove product build-up. (Here are a few tips on how to exfoliate your scalp!) While caring for your scalp is an important part of any hair care routine, are we unknowingly washing our scalps with products that do more harm than good?
Well, if you read the ingredients on the back of a shampoo bottle, you might be surprised. Many shampoos are filled with harmful chemicals you’ve never heard of and aren’t able to pronounce. These chemicals may not only be harmful to you, but they can also harm the environment. Plus, they strip your hair of natural oils, forcing you to purchase a separate, often equally harmful condition to replenish the oils you’ve lost.
In addition to harmful-for-everyone chemicals, many shampoos are sold in plastic bottles that are often only partially or totally unrecyclable. These bottles have already caused a tremendous amount of waste and done extensive damage to our planet. They’re dumped in our landfills and oceans, harming our atmosphere and our wildlife while they take thousands of years to decompose.
Unfortunately, shampoos have done lasting damage to our water supply in two major ways: their ingredients and the plastic containers that hold them.
One of the major environmental impacts of shampoo comes from the simple act of rinsing your hair. As the shampoo leaves your hair, the chemicals are sent down your drain and out into the water supply. These chemicals have been found in a variety of environments, including wastewater, surface water, sediment, groundwater, and drinking water.
Luckily, our drinking water is treated so you’re not ingesting those chemicals (another process that can be harmful to the environment), but our lakes, rivers, and oceans are not. These chemicals can harm both aquatic life and the animals that drink from these bodies of water. Research has shown that the chemicals in personal care products can change the hormone levels in aquatic organisms, which can cause a variety of health problems, including damaging their ability to reproduce.
Then there are the plastic bottles used to hold your shampoo. Many of them are either only partially recyclable or cannot be recycled, so they end up in our oceans and landfills. About nine million tons of plastic are thrown into the ocean annually, which is about one garbage truck of plastic every minute. These plastics can survive in water for thousands of years if they’re not consumed by marine life. When they are ingested, the chemicals in the plastic can injure or poison the animals. Those that don’t make their way into the bodies of these animals become floating waste, serving as transportation vehicles for invasive species, which can upset and damage very delicate habitats.
Dumping plastic in a landfill is equally dangerous. As they’re buried deeper into the pile and begin to decompose slowly, they can leach dangerous chemicals that eventually make their way into our groundwater and our air.
Airless pump bottles are becoming increasingly more popular in the cosmetics industry because of the advantages they provide and consumers are growing increasingly more aware of their benefits every day. Their growing popularity is attributed to the added product life they provide. This is due in part to the absence of dip tubes which have been replacement with airless, non-pressurized chambers. It is also due in part to the consumer’s demand for more products with no or limited number of preservatives in them. Consequently, they are ideal for natural and organic creams and serums.
Basically, airless pump bottles are non-pressurized, vacuum systems that are now used to some extent in the cosmetics industry. By pushing down on the pump, it forces the disc inside the bottle to rise which in turn dispenses the product out from the open tip of the pump. When the bottle is filled, it maintains the integrity of the product while at the same time preserving it until it has been used completely. Airless packaging technology increases the product’s shelf life as well. Thus, these are perfect for lotions and natural creams with no or little preservatives and chemicals.
Conversely, conventional pump bottles waste product because once it gets below a certain point in the container, the pump tube can no longer pull the remaining product up to the pump to dispense it. When this happens, you only have two choices. Either you can remove the pump from the bottle and try to scoop out the remaining product with a spatula like tool or you can throw the bottle and what’s left of the product away. While with airless pump bottles, this is never an issue.
By repeating this when more product is needed, the integrity of the product is degraded and it loses its effectiveness. With airless pump bottles, the product inside the container gets dispensed completely and remains stable throughout its use. Therefore, there’s no repeated opening of the bottle and no degrading of the product. Most importantly, there is little, if any waste. Additional advantages of airless pump bottles include:
In addition to these advantages, you can transfer your favorite products such as your foundations or moisturizers into the airless pump bottle for easier dispensing when needed. For more information regarding the different airless pump bottles we offer, please e-mail us at Sales@apackaginggroup.com or telephone (626) 385-5858.