Maximum FX Salons making beauty sustainable
The average salon produces 1,811 lbs. of waste per year! That includes hair, hair foils, color tubes, and excess hair color.
Maximum FX is the first salon in Austin, Texas to become a member of Green Circle Salons and has launched a comprehensive recycling / reuse program that will help to significantly reduce its environmental impact on the planet.
The program helps us redirect out of water streams and landfills everything that was once considered garbage: hair (in 2010 Green Circle Salons sent more than 1,000 pounds of hair to the Gulf of Mexico to help clean the BP oil spill), foils, color tubes, paper, plastics, and liquid chemical waste (most salons today simply rinse all leftover liquid chemicals into the sink and down the drain).
We are very excited to take our industry in a new direction with exceptional standards of environmental accountability. The beauty industry poses many challenges to the environment, from the sourcing of ingredients to the disposal of packaging and products. Through our alignment with Green Circle Salons, we hope to ameliorate our ecological footprint by implementing simple, green changes that will make our salon and our industry more sustainable. We are proud of this new partnership because we know that Green Circle Salons is 100% traceable and fully accountable for how they handle the materials we give them.
What does this mean for our customers?
• Peace of mind knowing that their salon has taken meaningful steps to keep our communities healthy.
• Today, consumers vote with their dollars. People make the choices for change. With the Green Circle platform, we empower green consumers with choices that support both environmental and social progress. We can now improve the beauty of our clients and the planet at the same time.
• By supporting our salon, they contribute to local and international community development, as well as environmental research and innovation.
• Easily and quickly identify North America’s green salon leaders through an online GCS Directory & smartphone app.
How does the program work?
A nominal environmental sustainability fee is included on each salon ticket where a service such as hair color or haircutting has been provided. This fee helps to facilitate our recycling program. Twice a month, all recycled material such as hair, hair foils, excess chemicals, color tubes, paper and plastic are shipped to a processing facility in Chicago, Illinois. There, material is separated and then properly disposed. Hair color chemicals are incinerated and then converted into energy while hair is re-purposed and used to create hair booms to aid clean up efforts from oil slicks all over the world. Today we divert up to 95% of all waste in our salons out of landfills and our water supply.
We want to leave the smallest possible footprint on our environment. In a notoriously wasteful industry, it is very important to us that we support the most enivonmentally friendly salon practices.