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Beauty

Liquid Foundation Bottle

30ml glass bottle with plastic pump

18
g
Total plastic weight

The glass body looks recyclable, but the metal spring inside the pump means the whole closure is usually rejected at sorting and burned.

5%
Recycle probability
450
Years to decompose
Liquid Foundation Bottle

Material breakdown

3 components
  • PP pump and dip tube11g
  • ABS cap5g
  • Label and seal film2g
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Production footprint

Per unit
0.36L
Water to produce
0.059kWh
Electricity to produce

Estimated upstream manufacturing footprint per unit, based on resin LCA averages.

Lower-impact alternatives

  • Compact foundation stick in cardboard
    Almost no plastic and no pump to discard.
    2g
    plastic
  • Refillable foundation with metal case
    One case, many refills.
    6g
    plastic
  • Tinted moisturiser in an aluminium tube
    Aluminium is recycled far more often.
    3g
    plastic
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References for this item

Peer-reviewed studies and institutional reports behind the figures above.

  • Degradation Rates of Plastics in the Environment
    Chamas, A., Moon, H., Zheng, J., Qiu, Y., Tabassum, T., Jang, J. H., Abu-Omar, M., Scott, S. L. & Suh, S. (2020) · ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 8(9), 3494–3511

    Open-access review that harmonises plastic degradation studies into a specific surface degradation rate, giving half-lives from 58 years for an HDPE bottle to 1,200 years for thick HDPE pipe. Peer-reviewed basis for how our decomposition windows scale with wall thickness and format.

  • Ranking environmental degradation trends of plastic marine debris based on physical properties and molecular structure
    Min, K., Cuiffi, J. D. & Mathers, R. T. (2020) · Nature Communications, 11, 727

    Ranks PE, PP, PET, PS, PVC and nylon by measured degradation susceptibility and shows that thickness, crystallinity and additives shift estimated lifetimes by one to two orders of magnitude. Backs our practice of scaling persistence by format rather than by polymer alone.

  • Monitoring polymer degradation under different conditions in the marine environment
    Beltrán-Sanahuja, A., Casado-Coy, N., Simó-Cabrera, L. & Sanz-Lázaro, C. (2020) · Environmental Pollution, 259, 113836

    Field study exposing PET, LDPE, HDPE, PP and PS in seawater, sediment and beach sand for nine months; conventional polymers lost under a few percent of their mass. Direct measured evidence for the very slow marine degradation behind our long persistence windows.

  • Alteration and progressive degradation of plastic waste in a Polish operational landfill analysed over 60 years
    Redko, V., Wolska, L., Cieślak-Piotrowicz, A. et al. (2024) · Communications Earth & Environment, 5, 563

    Excavated polyethylene bags and film buried for up to six decades in a working landfill and found only partial surface oxidation, not disappearance. Real-world confirmation that landfilled film persists far beyond the lifetimes often quoted.

All sources & methodology →