PACKAGING
Our passion is to get rid of packaging when designing a product. We use as little packaging in the shops as possible and give you the choice to go completely naked - we mean the products, not yourselves. About half of our products can be taken home with no packaging. We save nearly 6 million plastic bottles globally from selling shampoo bars alone.
When packaging is unavoidable, we prefer to use recycled materials. 90%, by weight, of our packaging material is recycled and we're working on the remaining 10%. We like our packaging to be reused, recycled or composted at the end of their lives and aim to have 100% of our packaging recyclable or compostable.
As recycling for our black pots is not available everywhere (despite being a clean and non-toxic material), we put our money where our mouth is and give a free fresh face mask when you bring five of them back. Black pots are recycled or re-used as art material. We also enjoy looking into new materials and for the future, legislation permitting, we would like to start using refills and to increase the amount of reusable packaging used to transport products between our factories and our shops.
NAKED
At Lush, when we say naked we are usually referring to the products you can buy with no packaging at all like our bath bombs, massage bars and solid shampoo bars to name a few. Lush inventors, many years ago, discovered that by designing clever products with no water would mean they could have no packaging and no preservatives. We save 1,350,000 litres of water just by making solid shampoo. For those who don't like the idea generating loads of rubbish, naked products are the way to go. If you go solid all the way, you can save over 30 plastic bottles a year from becoming rubbish. Drop that bottle, reach for the soap.
LESS IS BEST
When we can’t eliminate it completely, we look for the simplest packaging to do the job and use post-consumer recycled, recyclable and biodegradable materials whenever possible.
The total recycled content in all LUSH packaging is about 89% (including paper bags, aluminium tins, gift wrap, ribbons, boxes, tags and inserts). That means that for every ton of material bought by LUSH, 900kg come from recycled sources.
- Our pots and bottles are made with 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic, saving about 65 tons of CO2 and 90 tonnes of virgin plastic, or 800 barrels of oil, each year.
- Our carrier bags are made with 100% post-consumer recycled paper, saving 100 tonnes of CO2 each year. They’re now 2 grams lighter too which reduces emissions even more.
- We use biodegradable plastic bags and eco-friendly packing tape to protect products for shipment.
- Our gifts are lovingly wrapped with recycled paper and protected using shredded wood or recycled shredded paper, both of which are 100% biodegradable.
- Gift boxes are packaged with biodegradable filler.
