Brand Partner ContentEstablished in 2009, Green Circle Salons started a groundbreaking movement in the beauty industry empowering salons and other businesses to work towards the eradication of industry waste. By recycling and repurposing up to 95% of beauty waste including hair clippings, used foils, color tubes, excess hair color and more, Green Circle Salons has made a name for itself in the beauty industry. Taking an innovative approach to educate beauty professionals, and enabling them to understand the detrimental effects of beauty waste on the environment, this award-winning program allows its members to offset carbon emissions and reduce their environmental footprint.
Shane Price, Founder and CEO of Green Circle Salons, launched the company after he became aware of the inordinate amount of waste that was being generated at salons and sent to landfill. With an inexorable passion for the great outdoors, the successful Canadian entrepreneur recognized the deep need for a sustainable solution that would combat climate change and decarbonize the beauty industry. As a graduate of the University of Windsor, Ontario, where he majored in Molecular Biology and minored in Biochemistry, Price had spent several years in Fukuoka, Japan, operating Canadian Discoveries, a company which focused on creating unique outdoor experiential learning programs for travelers. He subsequently built upon that success by returning to Canada, where he solidified his reputation using his acumen working in the environmental space. Price then found himself focused on the beauty industry.
Equipped with the knowledge that the purpose of a salon is to beautify their clients, his desire was to extend the mission by making the salon a place where sustainable beauty could be implemented to benefit the greater good of the planet. Realizing that the two were inextricably connected, Price was inspired to create Green Circle Salons to finally flip the switch on the environmental challenge of beauty waste; and instead, to utilize these resources to unlock unique opportunities. Driven by his love for the environment, Shane Price employed every bit of his expertise, along with industry insiders, to come up with a way to combat the industry’s biggest issue: the creation of 877+ pounds of waste every single minute.
With more than 16,000 dedicated beauty professionals, Green Circle Salons keeps more than 8,262,481 pounds of beauty waste out of landfills in the U.S. and Canada every single year. While ensuring their own operations and practices are sustainable, Green Circle Salons gives their members the incentive they need to fulfill the demands of consumers who seek genuine green options in salon care.
Salons dispose of 63,000 pounds of hair every day, which cannot break down in landfill. Hair needs moisture and air to decompose; when full garbage bags of hair are thrown out, greenhouse gasses are produced as it tries to break down, and this leads to climate change. This is why a crucial part of the mission is to sort and recover hair clippings at salons across the U.S. and Canada.
Salons in North America throw away more than 110,000 lbs. of metal every day, including aluminum, which is, in fact, infinitely recyclable. Unfortunately, local recycling generally does not accept the metals from salons, due to common contamination. Collecting salon metals, including aluminum foils, as well as color tubes and cans, is one of the key service components provided by Green Circle Salons. These high-grade metals can be melted down and repurposed several times with very little degradation in quality. By eliminating these items from the waste stream, Green Circle Salons prevents them from ultimately overwhelming local landfill sites.
Over 42,000 pounds of excess hair color, such as lighteners and toners, are thrown away every day. At a minimum, this can be a big waste of money and eventually destroy plumbing; what’s far more frightening is that this waste generates huge environmental challenges – for instance, when rinsed down the drain, it finds its way back into soil, and worse, into the drinking water supply. However, there is a solution: instead of throwing it away, repurposed excess hair color can function as fuel utilizing a Waste-to-Energy model, creating new energy for reinjection into local power grids.
Green Circle Salons has plans to expand into different industries with ongoing innovative efforts that will make a positive impact on the environment. They’ve just announced a new Recovery Initiative for PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] in response to the sanitary requirements that have been implemented to ensure the responsible disposal of PPE. That said, Green Circle Salons is escalating its service to a diverse set of industries which include hospitals, dental offices, banks, movie sets, business offices, schools, breweries and independent shops. The new PPE Recovery Initiative creates accessibility for businesses to utilize best practices to sustainably discard PPE. Green Circle Salons provides boxes to companies who are interested in participating in the initiative, and subsequently collects them to recycle the debris.
The 16,000+ members of Green Circle Salons are truly agents of change! With the world facing an ongoing global climate crisis, it’s absolutely crucial to continue working together across Canada and the U.S. to generate the greatest impact. Every salon that participates in the mission of Green Circle Salons demonstrates to their local communities how beauty itself can in fact be sustainable, by eliminating one bag of waste at a time.
To find a Green Circle Salon near you go to: https://greencirclesalons.com/directory/
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.