Packaging is crucial to the beauty and personal care industry. It’s how a brand catches your eye on a drugstore shelf and keeps its products safe and sealed from contaminants. Unfortunately, a lot of that packaging is also plastic: In 2019 alone, the U.S. beauty industry produced more than 8.1 billion units of rigid plastic packaging, according to market research firm Euromonitor International, the vast majority of which is not recycled. A new beauty and wellness brand, called Ace of Air, aims to challenge this waste by operating with an entirely circular business model. After using up your Ace of Air moisturizer or serum, you can just ship the packaging back to the company to be sanitized, refilled, and used over and over again.
When the product is used up, customers swap in the provided return label, which sits in a window on the shipping box, and send the box and empties back. The box can fit in UPS drop boxes, so consumers don’t even have to find a UPS store. While they won’t get the rental fee back, they will get “planet points,” an Ace of Air rewards system that lets consumers convert those points to dollar donations for three charities the company supports: Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit focused on ocean policy; Peconic Land Trust, which conserves natural land on Long Island; and 5 Gyres, a nonprofit aiming to reduce plastic pollution.
If the Ace of Air box gets too damaged to reuse, it will get melted down—it’s made of 100% post-consumer recycled polypropylene, 30% of which is reclaimed ocean waste. If the product packaging also gets dinged or otherwise too run-down to reuse, the company will recycle the stainless steel, along with the rubber.
The world may not really need another beauty and wellness brand, Stahl says, but she and Nemcova started Ace of Air to be a catalyst for change when it comes to beauty packaging. “The beauty industry produces 120 billion units of packaging, which we don’t actually need,” Nemcova says. “We need the product.” Take into account the dismal fact that only an estimated 9% of plastic gets recycled (and all the ways our recycling systems are broken), and it’s easy to see how that waste piles up. “That’s why as a brand we’re taking full responsibility for our packaging.”