Recycling: 5 pro tips for your bathroom

Change is in the air, and your bathroom is no exception ! Like us, many of you say no more to skincare routines that require ten or so products, to expired products that have been lying around on your shelves for months, and above all, to non-recyclable packaging.

Just so you know what you're talking about ♻️, here's 5 professional tips to make your bathroom the planet's best friend.

All that glitters

In general, the cleaner it is, the better it recycles! The golden rule: avoid packaging with shiny, lacquered or gold effects (such as the pretty silver lid of your night cream). They may be nicer for your decor, but they are generally impossible to recycle.

4 materials, 1 burial

Choose packaging made from a single material: it is much easier to recycle. It's not easy to see that your toothpaste tube is a combination of three different plastics - but in some cases it's obvious. Example: your plastic compact with a built-in mirror. The mirror does not have a household waste recycling route - and it may also prevent the plastic itself from being recycled!

Wrap it up, it's weighed

Look out for products that are artificially weighted down to give you an impression of quality. Here's how it works: in the case of perfume, for example, many bottles have a thick "glass bottom" to make them look bigger and better. The result is excess glass and a heavier object to carry. All wrong! At Bastille, our bottles have only a thin glass base, just enough to protect the whole. And when people say to us "Oh yes, it's 50 ml? it's crazy, it looks like it's smaller!", we tell ourselves that we're right to try and change our habits...

They see me, they don't see me anymore.

A clear shampoo bottle is better than an opaque one. Why is that? Because at the sorting centre, the packaging is automatically sorted by robots, based on an optical analysis of the material. An opaque plastic or tinted glass can easily be confused with other materials and thus end up in the sorting centre instead of being recycled!

A label, it's very misleading

You probably don't know it, but the size of the label on a bottle has a real impact on its recycling (and to become a label pro and better understand your cosmetics, click here): a label that covers too much prevents the bottle from being correctly detected by the sorting center robots. Keep in mind that the label should not cover more than 50% of the product if you want it to have a chance of a second life. By the way, as part of our Bastille approach, we have chosen to screen-print our bottles: that way, no more problems!

In the end, very few products are fully recyclable and each of our actions counts. So the next time you choose your cosmetics, apply these little tips - and don't forget to talk about it around you: your sister, your friends, your husband are concerned too! 


Photo: Liubov Ilchuk