Taiwan-based green enterprise Hair O’right has recently launched a hair care brand called Recoffee, which joins the growing list of repurposed products that come from recycling coffee waste.
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Using the cradle to cradle concept, the personal care products maker said it is able to produce quality shampoo and hair conditioning products by extracting the oil from recycled ground coffee that they collect from Starbucks and other coffee shops in Taiwan.
Cradle to cradle is an industrial design that ensures the supply chain and life cycle of a product do not have negative impacts to the environment.
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If you consider that in every second 14,000 cups of coffee are consumed, which leads to a total amount of 22 million kilogrammes of discarded coffee grounds a year, there is enough coffee grounds we can use
Steven Ko, founder and chief executive officer, Hair O’right
Amid reports that the crop from coffee-producing regions may have less yield in the coming years due to climate change impacts, Hair O’right said its invention has also become a vehicle to send coffee seeds back to the soil.
Its shampoo is packaged in biodegradable bottles made from the same coffee waste, and are embedded with coffee seeds which can be buried in the soil, making every consumer of the product a potential coffee grower - under the right enviornmental conditions, said Hair O’right.
Founder and chief executive officer Steven Ko said there is no shortage of raw material supply at the moment. “If you consider that in every second 14,000 cups of coffee are consumed, which leads to a total amount of 22 million kilogrammes of discarded coffee grounds a year, there is enough coffee grounds we can use,” Ko told Eco-Business.
Up to 99.3 per cent of the shampoos are made from natural plant materials. As part of the company’s commitment, none of it contains any of the eight harmful substances such as environmental hormones (nonylphenol), parabens, formaldehyde, phthalates, colorants, thickener (diethanolamine derivatives or foaming agents), ethylene oxide derivatives and sulfate surfactants, added Ko.
Regarding palm oil ingredients, Ko stressed: “We don’t use palm oil as a main ingredient for any of our products, but a small number of the ingredients we are using do contain palm oil derivatives.”
The firm confirmed that its palm oil sources are certified by the Roundtable for Sustainble Palm Oil.
The beauty care manufacturer was recently awarded for this innovation by Inpex, a United States-based invention show for new products.
This article has been updated to reflect additional information about its palm oil sources.
