Circular Beauty Logistics 

“Having a piece of reusable packaging is the easy part,” says Jo Chidley, founder of UK-based return and reuse platform, Reposit, which works with retailers including Marks and Spencer and Walmart. Yet it’s the part of circularity that beauty brands have put most of their weight behind, as consumer demand for less plastic waste and packaging has grown. L’Oréal Group has introduced refillable packaging concepts for brands such as La Roche-Posay, Mugler, and Kérastase across categories including skincare, haircare, and fragrance; Lisa Eldridge released a prestige sculptural refillable lipstick case; and Fussy and Wild staked claims in refillable solid deodorants. 

But what of the infrastructure needed to actually get product back into the reusable packaging and fulfil its purpose? That’s the trickiest piece of the puzzle, says Chidley, and without it in place, refillable packaging could have unintended environmental impacts. 

Estimates vary greatly depending on the product and even the boundaries and methodologies behind any given lifecycle assessment (LCA), but all pieces of reusable packaging have an environmental break-even point. That is the minimum number of uses required for a reusable container to be environmentally preferable to a piece of single-use packaging, when the impact of its production is offset by prolonged use, and that extended lifespan means fewer single-use alternatives being needed.

That break-even point varies by material and by process. For a stainless steel reusable coffee cup that figure can be as high as 140 uses, according to a 2024 study published by Delft University of Technology. For an aluminium shampoo bottle the figure could be as low as three uses (comparing one with 50% recycled content to a plastic bottle with 50% recycled content), per a Carbon Bright LCA analysis.

To ensure brands are not simply making higher impact packaging with misplaced intentions, building the infrastructure necessary to facilitate easy and convenient reuse is essential, and what that infrastructure looks like depends on which refill model a brand opts for.

One size doesn’t fit all

There are several refill models at play within the beauty and personal care (BPC) sector, with varying degrees of ease and proximity to the consumer: 

• In-store refill, where a user takes their empty container and refills it at an in-store hub.
• Home decanting refill, where a user fills their empty, cleaned container at home with a refill packaged in ‘lower impact’ packaging, such as a flexible pouch.
• Home drop-in refill, where a user drops a pre-filled pod or cartridge into their existing container.
• Home concentrate refill, where a user adds a concentrated tablet or powder into water.
• Prefill, where a user picks a pre-filled reusable container off the shelf, or orders it online, and pays a deposit to ‘lease’ the packaging, which is refunded when they return it.

The requirement from the brand and consumer varies between the models. In-store refill arguably requires the most effort from the consumer, who must clean containers, take them back to store, and spend the time filling them, while the brand or retailer must supply refill stations and the necessary restocking and spillage clean-up resources. Feelings of overwhelm and lack of confidence, uncertainty around pricing, inconvenience and perceptions around cleanliness all act as barriers to consumer uptake for this model.

Home refilling requires the development of new packaging – and formulations if concentrated – and the addition of extra SKUs on the brand side. It reduces time in-store but requires some effort at home and generally still results in some packaging waste. On Repeat wants to change that. The UK-based company provides a compostable alternative to the now ubiquitous reduced plastic pouch – used by everyone from Dove to Diptyque for their liquid refills – as part of its 360° fulfilment and packaging service. 

Its packaging format is a food safe, compostable biopolymer film pouch sandwiched in a cardboard envelope that users snip the corner off before pouring the contents into their container. Developing the film took about two years, but that wasn’t the end of the story. “It’s about creating that infrastructure that supports the material,” company co-founder Ben Procter told me. “Compostables are designed to break down, so we thought, “let’s use them for a short time”, and that short time is shipping it from our fulfilment lab to the customer.”

To work with On Repeat – as brands including Bouclème and the company formerly known as Haeckels (as it’s known mid-rebrand) do – all clients must do is send it their bulk product. On Repeat handles the rest, from warehousing the product in a clean room located within a static-free aerospace facility, to decanting the orders responsively. This ensures product spends as little time as possible within the film at the supply end, giving the consumer a full five days within which to decant it. “Mondays are a really busy day because we’ve got everything from midday on Friday, which is our cut-off,” Procter says.

With hassle-reduction for the consumer at the heart of On Repeat’s – and by extension, its clients’ – refill model, none of these extra steps are consumer-facing, and the entire paradigm is white-label. “We integrate with brands’ e-comm stores, and you as a consumer don’t see anything other than your favourite brand’s website,” says Procter. They simply choose the refill option and complete the purchasing process as normal; all order confirmations and communications coming directly from the brand. The system operates, Procter explains, much as it would if a brand were using any third-party warehousing and fulfilment service, only On Repeat deals exclusively in refills. 

When discovering On Repeat’s unique material, Procter says some brands ask for the packaging only with the intention of handling the logistics themselves. “But once you start telling them about how involved it is… [they realise] it’s one less thing for them to worry about.”

Building out an operational network

Tom Szaky, CEO of Terracycle and global reuse platform Loop, which works with retailers and brands such as Carrefour and Unilever, has had similar conversations. “Your brain will melt when you have to figure all this stuff out,” he says. Loop, like Reposit, operates on a pre-fill model, as close to traditional shopping as you can get, allowing a consumer to buy a pre-filled product in the container they will use it. “Why did disposability win?” asks Szaky. “It won because it has unparalleled affordability and convenience… and we’ve made every decision around that.”

Some of the containers on a pre-fill shelf will be characteristically ‘reusable’ to the consumer eye – made from aluminium, for instance, with different products packaged in uniform bottles, differentiated only by branded stickers. However, convincing global brands to convert wholesale to a completely new packaging type is a major barrier to adoption, so Szaky chose to leverage existing packaging. As it turns out, a great deal of packaging on the market already meets the threshold for being reusable. Think glass perfume bottles, thick plastic shampoo bottles, and high-end skincare bottles. “And you don’t have to wait five or ten uses to hit break-even, you hit it at use one,” Szaky says.

Chidley also notes the surprising amount of packaging already fit for reuse. For the packaging that isn’t, Reposit offers packaging-as-a-service, and works with clients to determine which products would be most suitable to launch in its range of aluminium containers.

Chidley explains that Reposit works closely with clients on all aspects of roll-out, from marketing and formulation to cleaning. “80% of what we do is building the infrastructure and 20% is project management and consultancy because businesses haven’t done this before,” she says.

Whether reusable by design or by chance the journey the packaging takes looks much the same once the system is established: it is filled in a brand’s fulfilment centre, shipped to stores, purchased, returned, cleaned, and sent back to the start of the loop again to be refilled.

Though both companies run research and development centres to test the many processes involved, neither Loop nor Reposit owns the infrastructure from end-to-end, rather each has built a network of operational partners, from multi-stakeholder bodies to develop packaging parameters (in Loop’s case) to cleaning facilities, warehousing, and haulage.

This is where companies such as UK-based Again come into play. Self-described as an “infrastructure layer”, its decentralised network of CleanCells – reusable packaging cleaning facilities housed in shipping containers – allow brands to sanitise and recondition their packaging from 12p per unit, priced to compete with single-use and operated in line with food safety standards. 

The choice of cleaning facility will depend on factors including proximity, scale, and even what’s in a product. For instance, if a product contains allergens that could become airborne, a specialist cleaner might be required. It’s complex, but there are some surprising upsides of working in the BPC sector.

“What’s interesting is that it’s actually easier to clean beauty products than almost anything else,” says Chidley. “The majority of beauty products have surfactants in them, which help with cleaning, so we’re using a waste byproduct to help the detergent.”

The tech piece

Beyond the practical logistics lies the tech. True convenience, for the consumer, means being able to pick a tub of moisturiser up in one store and returning the empty at another when you’re running a different errand, or dropping it in the post when you’re sending off a birthday card. That requires tracking, generally in the form of a QR code (scanned like a barcode) or an RFID (scanned automatically at a point of sale with a reader installed) that logs when a piece of packaging has been returned and refunds the deposit paid during the initial transaction. Loop requires users to have an app, while Reposit asks them to scan a QR code which takes them to a return portal.  

Aside from facilitating the circulation of deposits and packaging, the tracking also generates crucial performance data. Without gathering any sensitive personal information, Reposit’s data allows brands and retailers to analyse which products are selling more units in reusable formats than in single use, or to see that more consumers are buying an own-brand product because it’s available in reusable packaging. Loop’s data, meanwhile, showed that putting fewer individual SKUs but more overall product selection on a shelf resulted in 240% better sales and 500% better return rates – indispensable insight for improving consumer and brand buy-in.

Despite the evidenced potential, reuse in BPC (much like repair and recycling in fashion) remains at small scale and requires bolder investment to build the infrastructure if it’s ever to rival the convenience of single use. But the incentives for investing in that build-out could be profound: “If any organisation looked back at how much they have invested in single use, [then] invested the same amount in circular techniques, not only would they be more profitable, but they would be more environmentally sound. We would become scalable, cheaper, and more profitable, more quickly,” says Chidley.