Greenwashing at it's finest. Positioned as a revolutionary recycling program. Any metropolitan or other recycling program that takes plastic also takes the caps. Aveda just lost a lot of respect with me.

I've lived in several communities over the last few years, according the recycling guidelines in most of them (current township included) plastic caps should be removed from plastic bottles, which would imply that they don't get recycled. I dutifully remove the caps, but feel bad about throwing them away. Now I can save them up and drop them off at the Aveda school when I get my hair cut by their students. Thank you Aveda!

Dear Anonymous,
How lame to be critical of this innovative program when your criticism is based simply on a lack of knowledge. Unlike metal caps, plastic caps can not be recycled with the bottles that they come with. If you have been putting them in with your plastic recycling, you're contaminating the rest of the recycling. You should start removing your plastic tops and bring them into Aveda. Perhaps it would also be wise to hold off your public criticism of a company that is doing so many good things environmentally until you have your facts straight. Thanks Aveda for leading the way again - the genuine depth of your committment is appreciated.

I think Aveda is filling a need. Our city and county recycle bottles, but ask us to take the caps off and throw them away. This is a great way to recycle my caps which would otherwise end up in the trash.

I am a Package Design Engineer. Here's the truth about bottle caps and recycling from the inside. Most caps are made from "PolyPropylene" (Not PVC as someone else posted). PolyPropylene is actually one of the most widely used and useful, and one of the most "recycle-ABLE" of all the plastics. So why doesn't more of it actually get recycled, as others in this forum have pointed out? Because simply, it is difficult for the recyclers to sort it out from the bottles (usually made from PET or HDPE). Think about it from their point of view of running a business...they only sort out what is most easily separated quickly, and in the largest quantities. This means that the larger bottles are much easier to deal with than the much smaller caps. So it is not generally worth their time, money, and effort to try and sort out and recycle all of those small (and annoying) bottle caps. So they just separate out the easy larger items (the bottles) and discard everything else, no matter what it is or how recyclable it actually is as a material. That's the sad truth. This is in fact one of my biggest pet peeves about the recycling infrastructure (or lack there-of), and something that I and others like me are trying to figure out how to solve and improve.

So what Aveda is doing is absolutely great!! They are directly helping to improve one of the worst lackings about the recycling industry...making it easier to collect and recycle all of those valuable PolyPropylene bottle caps! Basically you, the consumer, are helping to accomplish the difficult sorting job, there-by making it more worthwhile and valuable to recycle these things! Way to go Aveda!