Burt’s Bees Launches Lip Balm Tube Recycling Program

Burt's Bees has partnered up with Preserve, a sustainable consumer goods company known for its 100 percent recycled products, to encourage recycling of the #5 plastics commonly used in consumer goods packaging.

The partnership is part of Preserve's Gimme 5 program, which lets consumers return products containing plastic #5 for reuse in other products like razors and toothbrushes. Consumers can now recycle tubes from Burt's Bees Lip Balm, Tinted Lip Balm and Lip Shimmer, as well as the plastic caps from all Burt's Bees products, at Gimme 5 recycling bins across the country or by mailing the products in.

#5 plastic, or polypropylene plastic, is the most common plastic used in the U.S., according to the EPA, and can be found in anything with a hard plastic package (toothbrushes, cottage cheese containers, medicine bottles, lip balm tubes, yogurt containers, and so on). Unlike its #1 and #2 counterparts, which are recycled at a reasonably high rate, over 99 percent of #5 plastic gets sent to the landfill.

This represents a loss of a vast source of raw material, as #5 is one of the most benign plastics and can be reused to create new products with relative ease. To date, efforts to recycle #5 have been shockingly sparse: Preserve’s Gimme 5 program is the only large-scale recycling program for #5 plastic in the entire country.

Gimme 5 bins cans be found at Whole Foods and a number of other natural food markets across the country. Preserve lists collection locations on its website. In addition to Burt’s Bees products, Preserve also collects its own products, as well as products from Stonyfield, Brita and Tom’s of Maine.

Burt's Bees, which was founded in 1984 as a candle making partnership between Burt Shavitz and Roxanne Quimby, sells a variety of household products made from 99 percent all-natural materials.

“Our Beeswax Lip Balm started out in a clay pot, then moved into a tin, and didn’t end up in a yellow plastic tube until founders, Burt and Roxanne, were able to source a recycled plastic tube in the 1990s," said Paula Alexander, Director of Sustainable Business at Burt's Bees. "We’re proud to take the next step in managing the life cycle of our lip care packaging by providing an important recycling service to our consumers through our partnership with Preserve.”

Burt’s Bees has been a poster child for natural food products, experiencing colossal growth behind its most popular product, lip balm, which the company introduced in 1991. When Clorox purchased Burt's Bees in 2007, Quimby left the company with a reported $350 million.

Though not as large as Burt's Bees, Preserve has been around since 1995 and has built a remarkably successful business selling products made from 100 percent recycled material. In early 2012, Preserve became a Certified B Corporation, joining the ranks of over 500 companies from 60 industries that have met rigorous standards of social and environmental performance.

“Preserve is ‘proof of concept’ for a new way of doing business," said Jay Coen Gilbert, B Lab co-founder. "Preserve is a model for other companies due to its pioneering work in creating sustainable consumer products and bringing together like-minded companies to create recycling systems for their products.”

To date, Preserve has managed to repurpose nearly 100 tons of recycled plastic into its products. The company sells a wide range of products, including kitchen storage containers, toothbrushes, razors, toothpicks, colanders, measuring cups, and cutting boards.

[Image credit: ayustety, Flickr]