The Chinese beauty and cosmetics market continues to expand — forecast to reach RMB 579.1 billion (USD 81.3 billion) by 2025 — intensifying brand competition and increasing demand for plastic packaging.
With China exporting more cosmetics than ever before, companies are increasingly emphasising branding to diversify their products and help drive their expansion into international markets. Growing volumes of products coming to the market, combined with efforts to differentiate brands via packaging, are leading to increased volumes of plastic waste.
Packaging is usually the first and last thing we see when we interact with a product. What happens to that packaging when the product is finished can be an afterthought, resulting in it typically ending up as waste. Chinese cosmetic company Yan An Tang (YAT) offers its users an alternative to throwing away these items by recovering them for post-consumer recycling (PCR). As of February 2024, YAT has 280,000 registered users, and has received more than 230,000 empty bottle orders. Estimating an average of three bottles per order, the business has recycled nearly 750,000 cosmetic bottles.
Why is it an example of the circular economy?
Despite the progress that has been made by concerted and ambitious initiatives — such as the Global Commitment — the world is off track to tackle plastic waste and pollution. However, a circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. can help to stop plastic packaging becoming waste, by eliminating the plastic we don’t need; innovating towards new materials and business models; and circulating the plastic we still use.
In China, approximately 3 billion empty cosmetic bottles were produced in 2021, with 70% being incinerated or landfilled as general waste. Several makeup and personal care brands — such as L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Coty, L'Occitane, Shu Uemura, and Herborist — have initiated recycling schemes in China for empty packaging. But recycling cosmetic packaging remains complex as the materials used are often compound plastics and are hard to process due to wide variations in shape, size, and colour (including the use of dyes and pigments that can prove challenging for sorting and recycling infrastructure). Added to this, used packaging often retains a lot of residue from the cosmetic product which requires more intensive cleaning and processing before it can be recycled.
These challenges have led to a fragmented and inconvenient system which can deter consumers and companies from participating in recycling schemes. Without specialised recycling channels, adequate recycling facilities, and consistent recycling standards, options for disposal are limited and packaging is likely to end up as waste. YAT aims to minimise this waste and increase recycling rates by offering a one-stop solution where consumers can send their mixed packaging waste, ensuring that more of this is captured and processed.
How it works
YAT secured financing from AptarGroup, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of pharmaceutical delivery, consumer product dispensing, and material science solutions. Post-financing, the business applied for licences and operating permits, selected a site for its environmental recycling facility and commenced internal construction. In 2021, YAT launched its platform, ‘Diary RecycleRecycleTransform a product or component into its basic materials or substances and reprocessing them into new materials.’, which works through a mini-app embedded within WeChat. In 2023, the skincare brand ran a pilot with 448 Watsons stores — one of Asia’s biggest health and beauty retailers — to test in-store recycling models.
By incorporating SaaS (Software as a Service) into the mini-app, YAT has built a sharingsharingThe use of a product by multiple users. It is a practice that retains the highest value of a product by extending its use period. recycling infrastructure that makes the process of returning used packaging more convenient for users. By increasing collection volumes in this way, YAT reduces operational costs for all stakeholders involved, and negates the need for individual beauty brands to invest in creating their own mini-apps to enable convenient customer recycling. This also allows YAT’s recycling service to be integrated into a cosmetic brand’s user functionality, providing data regarding users’ recycling behaviour for partnering companies. For example, the mini-app will record product information about the bottles sent back by users, including brand name, product name, category, packaging material, etc.
To send their empty packaging, users must register with their phone and WeChat number and request a collection. Once an order has been collected and received at a warehouse in Suzhou, YAT handles sorting, cleaning, disassembly, crushing, and granulating the empty cosmetic bottles, producing PCR content that can be incorporated back into new products.
However, achieving the perfect makeup of any circular business model comes with its complexities.
How are challenges overcome?
After receiving tens of thousands of bottles, YAT struggled to identify the brand associated with the empty bottles for sorting. Initially, the company used data from Taobao (a Chinese online shopping platform) and Baidu (a Chinese tech company) to identify different packaging but found discrepancies in bottles that appeared to be identical but displayed different texts. Harnessing cutting-edge technology allowed the company to overcome this hurdle. By adopting image recognition technology, YAT accumulated two million data points to identify text information on empty bottles enabling the recyclers to differentiate between brands when there were no other visual markers. Using material recognition equipment and robotic arms for automated material sorting after manual disassembly, YAT could streamline the sorting process, reducing the need for human labour and improving material identification accuracy.
Lack of standardisation and harmonisation proved a barrier to the efficient processing of products. To optimise the sorting and recycling process and ensure that the product could be recycled efficiently, YAT has introduced standards for its users to follow. Now, YAT only accepts the recycling of regular-sized product bottles and does not collect sample-sized or disposable packaging that cannot be recycled efficiently or at a high quality. Users must adhere to these recycling standards before requesting collection and include a minimum of three bottles per collection order to minimise delivery packaging.
Data collected by YAT’s mini-app can improve beauty brands’ materials innovation efforts by leveraging user behaviour data. By grasping the material composition, weight, and other information about Chinese beauty brand’s packaging, YAT is collecting valuable industry insights which beauty brands can leverage to gain more consumer insights. Brands will be better informed about the design of their packaging and determine whether the composite material of their empty bottles can meet recycling standards through technological processing. To encourage this, YAT promotes minimalist packaging design through its media channels, sharing research to inform brands and encourage developmental conversations.
