HAZLETON, Pa. — Salon owner Ashley Evert didn't like seeing all the hair foils filling up her trash cans every day at Halogen Hair Company in Hazle Township.
"A single-use item like that's going into the trash and just sitting in landfills literally made me want to cry."
A bit of research led her to the Green Circle Salon program, a company that collects and recycles beauty waste, from hair dye to actual human hair.
"Green Circle actually sends [hair] out to oil spills to help clean up the oil because the hair is porous, so it soaks it up really safely," Evert explained.
"Our metal hair-coloring foils, aerosol cans, all that kind of stuff gets recycled into new metal objects. Our color – I think is the coolest one – gets separated out between the oils in the water at water treatment facilities, and then the oil gets blended into fuel, and the water gets sent back into the water system."
Recycling this much waste is no easy feat, especially while Ashley was the only one running the show here for years. Thanks to a team of stylists, and some state funding, items like single-use gloves now have somewhere to go other than a landfill.
"The beauty industry is one of the largest contributors to waste; everything that we have comes in metal tubes or plastic bottles," said stylist Brooke Sheets. "So knowing that we're sending all of these items somewhere where they'll actually be used for a greater good is really rewarding."
"It makes me feel really good, as a person who just graduated cosmetology school, and seeing that this is the first salon in the area to do anything like this, it makes me feel really proud that I'm a part of it," said Johna Rudden.
"It's just rewarding knowing that we're making a big difference. It's being used for something better," said Kassandra Bogner.
"It definitely was a bit of a learning curve to figure out what goes where. Those are some of the little things that we didn't think about," said Kimberly Ray. "But now that we're finally getting into the groove of it because it's our first month doing it, we're really having a good time, and we're having fun doing it too, which is awesome."
And as Ashley says, it doesn't have to be perfect to be worth doing.
"I think we read a lot of things in the news about climate change, and we see stuff on social media, we watch Netflix documentaries, and it can feel very doom-and-gloom and scary, and I think we can feel crushed by that weight. But I think it's important to just start, just do anything."
Halogen Hair Company is the first salon in Luzerne County to register as a Green Circle Salon, but the owner hopes they're not the only ones for long.
"I really, really hope that it inspires other salons, and other businesses as a whole really, and even an individual, to make a change."
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