As British Beauty Week 2025 shines a spotlight on sustainability as one of the defining pillars of growth for the industry’s future, few partners embody that ambition more powerfully than MYGroup.
The company is the UK leader in recycling used beauty and cosmetics products, offering the only fully circular take-back scheme solution on the market – from collection and processing to remanufacturing into new materials and products – with zero waste to landfill or incineration.
This week, just in time for BBW, MYGroup has reached a major milestone: 40,000 tons of used beauty and cosmetics items collected and processed through its schemes with leading brands and retailers to date.
That’s millions of used products, plastic, metal, glass and cosmetic residue, the equivalent in weight to three of London’s ‘Big Ben’ Elizabeth Tower: a quintessentially British measure of progress in circular beauty.
But even as MYGroup celebrates this achievement, its message to the beauty industry is clear: recycling isn’t the end of the story, but just the beginning.
Take-back and waste remanufacturing solution: Our makeover for beauty and cosmetics waste management
MYGroup works with some of the most recognisable names in beauty – Boots, Harrods, Cult Beauty, LOOKFANTASTIC and Superdrug among them – to deliver the industry’s leading take-back schemes. These collaborations are helping brands achieve their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and wider sustainability and circularity goals in the here and now.
Consumers can drop off used items in bespoke in-store collection boxes, using scan technology to earn rewards, or return products by post through Royal Mail. Every lipstick case, mascara tube and fragrance bottle is then tracked, sorted and processed in-house at MYGroup’s state-of-the-art Hull facility, where packaging and residual products are fully recovered, separated and repurposed – all within a transparent, auditable and zero-to-landfill process.
Where recovery ends, reinvention begins. Through its ReFactory™ business, processed waste materials are recovered into new products – from injection-moulded small items, such as combs and mirrors, to fittings and furniture created from MYBoard™ – a durable wood-replacement material made entirely from plastic waste – to bespoke furniture and point-of-sale pieces.
Meanwhile, MYGroup’s Exiled™ fashion and homeware brand pushes circular design into new territory, transforming recovered textiles and plastics into refined garments, accessories and homeware. Together, ReFactory and Exiled demonstrate what can be achieved when waste is treated not as a problem, but as potential.
What cosmetics and beauty waste can MYGroup recover?
MYGroup’s cosmetics and beauty take-back scheme solution covers the safe and complete recovery of a wide range of used products and packaging, including hazardous items.
Make-up
- Compacts
- Concealers and foundations (tubes and sticks)
- Eyeliner pencils and cases
- Eyeshadow palettes and tubes
- Lipsticks, glosses and balms
- Mascara tubes
- Make-up palettes
Skincare, haircare and personal care
- Beauty jars and cream containers
- Skincare bottles and tubes
- Lotion pumps
- Soap and handwash pumps
- Shampoo and conditioner bottles (including caps)
- Vitamin and supplement bottles and containers
- Travel minis and samples
- Tubs
Hazardous items
- Perfumes and fragrance bottles
- Nail varnish bottles
Medicines and vitamins
- Blister packs (used and unused)
Unlike many recyclers, MYGroup holds full Environment Agency permits for hazardous waste, enabling it to process packaging and any remaining cosmetic residue, as well as used and unused blister packs for medicines, vitamins and supplements, safely and responsibly. These wastes are converted into bio-fuel.
This comprehensive capability, even for the hardest-to and commonly considered ‘unrecyclable’ items, makes MYGroup’s scheme the only choice in the market to deliver true circularity for brands in the beauty industry.
Beyond recycling: Our Bio-Park driving the industry’s next sustainable frontier
Looking ahead to a more circular beauty industry, addressing the existing waste problem can only be half the story. The more exciting half lies in what comes next.
MYGroup believes the next frontier for a sustainable industry is utilisation of materials that never become ‘waste’ again: clean, bio-derived and endlessly reusable.
It’s why we have established a six-acre Bio-Park integrating multiple biological processes in one place, actively pioneering a new materials economy:
- Black Soldier Fly and worm bioconversion, consuming organic waste and producing oils, bio-materials and more.
- Mycelium cultivation, with potential applications in novel cosmetic ingredients and biodegradable packaging.
- Algal production, capturing carbon and producing renewable biomass with potential for both natural ingredients and bio-polymers.
- Further enzyme innovation, deconstructing and rebuilding waste at the molecular level, with the potential for bio-based plastic packaging.
Each of these integrated processes is designed not in isolation, but as part of a living ecosystem. The result is a dynamic hub capable of transforming organic and complex waste into bio-based materials with real industrial potential.
In this way, the Bio-Park also serves as a collaboration hub. In this space, brands, researchers and innovators can pilot new ideas, test bio-derived materials and explore closed-loop opportunities between waste recovery and product development.
Opening its doors to partners across the beauty sector, MYGroup is helping to bridge the gap between recycling and regeneration: between what exists today and what the industry will need tomorrow.
Educating and empowering the next generation
MYGroup’s impact extends beyond industry and innovation through SchoolCycled™, its flagship education and social impact programme designed to educate the next generation on recycling and reducing their environmental footprint, while supporting schools and trusts to meet their sustainability curriculum objectives.
Funded entirely by MYGroup through an over £800,000 investment to date and now active in more than 400 UK primary schools, SchoolCycled has engaged over 40,000 pupils, transforming recycling into a hands-on learning experience.
Children are incentivised to recycle by earning furniture, fittings and other products for their school, all manufactured out of MYBoard produced from the very plastic waste they collect. Since launch, SchoolCycled has diverted more than 20 tons of plastic from landfill.
In parallel, the scheme provides schools and wider trusts with recycling facilities for plastic and other hard-to-recycle waste streams, educational resources and data.
British Beauty Council patronage and our invite to the industry
As MYGroup’s collaborations with major brands have deepened, so too has its role within the wider beauty ecosystem. Earlier this year, the company joined the British Beauty Council as a Patron – the first waste management and recycling firm to do so, and reflecting a natural next step in our company’s evolution from recycler to reformer.
This membership places MYGroup at the heart of where the industry’s sustainability agenda is being shaped, with the company bringing its operational insight, data and infrastructure to help translate ambition into action for the Council and its membership, ensuring circularity becomes achievable, not aspirational.
MYGroup encourages wider partnership and collaboration with the Council’s members, whether to explore take-back schemes, pilot innovation projects through its Bio-Park or engage with the SchoolCycled programme – seizing the opportunities to connect sustainability goals with tangible results on the ground.
We believe there must be a growing convergence between the industry and waste management partners to build the systems and drive the behaviours that will define a more sustainable sector, and we stand ready to help guide the industry into this next chapter.
