Earlier this Summer, sustainable innovator Shellworks launched the world’s first fully home-compostable dropper. I’ll let the impact of that sink in.

Think serums, scalp oils, foundations, so many beauty formats rely on a dropper for use. What if they could all seemingly magically break down in your at-home compost heap? Well, we are well on the way.

‘We saw (the dropper) as a great opportunity to also demonstrate everything we’d been developing over the past five years because it really challenges what people thought possible with sustainable materials,’ starts Amir Afshar, Co-Founder at Shellworks and newly appointed British Beauty Council Advisory Board.

He continues: ‘Firstly, this part of packaging is made of many different components which makes recycling very challenging, second it is too small to be recycled.’

With the beauty industry cultivating more than 120bn units of packaging a year, the amount of pipettes and droppers that end up in landfill is hard to fathom. This new dropper, created with Vivomer – a plastic-free, petroleum-free, free of toxic additives, and completely stable material – has the potential to cut this damaging impact out. Only if the industry plays ball, though.

Afshar has nailed the functionality and aesthetics of his innovation; where the challenge comes is scalability. ‘The final challenge with new materials is being able to show that you are as good as the existing solution, people have very high expectations… We are working on keeping the cost down but this comes with more people buying into innovation, which can make it a bit of a chicken and egg situation,’ he explains.

Sam McKnight isn’t just a leader when it comes to hair, he’s setting the agenda when it comes to packaging his award-winning products too. Speaking candidly to Cosmetics Business News, McKnight said: ‘I knew it was a risk, without a doubt, and I am not 100% happy with the colour… But it is something we can start, and we can work on… There is a compromise, but it’s a compromise I am prepared to make.’

Thanks to its bottles, cups, jars, droppers and caps, Shellworks has already successfully replaced over 90 tonnes of conventional plastic with its innovative, compostable solutions. From fully-formed and functional to soil-synonymous in sixteen weeks, the packaging really is stuff of the future.

The best bit? You really shouldn’t see a difference to how packaging works when a brand uses Vivomer. ‘Until now, people have thought that sustainable choices mean granola looking products which don’t work as they are supposed to, or that they need to change their behavior to continue to use products. With Vivomer, nothing needs to change, we just work with brands to deliver a solution that works as you would expect minus the waste and health impacts.’

So far, Shellworks has relied on renegade indies to bite the (non-damaging) bullet – ‘Formerly Known as Haeckels, Eclo, Sam McKnight and Wildsmith Skin to name just a few,’ he says. But, he believes there’ll be wider uptake imminently thanks to a consumer shift in thinking.

‘Consumers are more and more aware of the challenges of plastics, and more recently the shift in focus from just sustainability to the negative health implications of plastic is driving greater adoption… we want to provide hope and possibility rather than doom and gloom because the current state of packaging is a hidden or under discussed issue,’ Afshar says.

Packaging is the unsung hero of the beauty industry – our products simply wouldn’t work without their homes – and the industry needs sustainability innovators like Shellworks to match their heroism. Who was it that said, ‘not all heroes wear capes’?

Shellworks has previously presented at the British Beauty Council’s Plastic Solution’s Summit, which will be returning this British Beauty Week as the Packaging Solutions Summit. It will focus on scalable alternatives to plastic packaging in our sector through the lens of the Future of Beauty. Keep your eye on the British Beauty Week schedule (Link to new BBW events page) to learn more.