You may do it without realising: throwing your empty moisturiser, lip products and other used cosmetics packaging into the recycling bin, assuming that the plastic will be made reusable again.
But a new BBC documentary shows that our love of cosmetics is affecting the environment, because much of the packaging of our favourite products cannot easily be recycled.
BBC Three investigated how big a challenge the cosmetics industry now faces. The team met Shilpi Chotri, a member of the campaign group Break Free From Plastic in San Francisco, and ecologist Martin Bourque.
Where the plastic goes
Since 1950, only 9 per cent of all the world's plastic has been recycled. About 12 per cent has been burned. Most of the rest has either ended up in the ground or in the sea.
"On top of that, it is being dumped in many countries such as those in South Asia," says Shilpi. "The United States has been sending its waste abroad for decades," she says.
A lot of plastic waste has ended up in Indonesia. Shilpi showed a video of a place in Indonesia once used for farming that has now become a rubbish dump.
Source: BBC Bangla. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.
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