• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, March 16, 2017

Garnier USA is teaming up with DoSomething.org and TerraCycle to get the young women of America to change their bathroom behavior and increase recycling of the millions of beauty and personal-care products bottles that wind up in landfills each year. The “Rinse, Recycle, Repeat” campaign stars YouTube star Remi Cruz in a PSA, and aims to turn 10 million empties into something more useful 

The campaign is part of a larger repositioning of Garnier’s flagship Fructis brand, says Ali Goldstein, SVP/marketing. “We haven’t done a massive renovation of this brand since it was introduced in 2003, and young women have changed a lot since then.”

She tells Marketing Daily that the company pepped up the brand’s formulation, adding super fruits and citrus proteins, for example. It has redesigned the shape of packaging, and started a new ad campaign from Publicis. But the relaunch “also includes a change in the packaging itself, which is now made from 50% post-recycled materials, up from 30%.” And it’s added a smart label, which lets users scan a QR code for in-depth information about the product. 

She says younger Millennials and Gen Zers are, as most market researchers agree, more concerned about sustainability in the products they buy. “But because our products have always been based on natural ingredients, it’s especially embedded in our DNA.”

That said, there are still significant obstacles to bathroom-based recycling, she says. So while the company has partnered with TerraCycle on recycling efforts since 2011, it wanted to step up the effort by working with DoSomething.org, which includes more than 5.5 million young activists.

Overall, about half of Americans don’t recycle beauty and personal care product packaging. “While people have bigger kitchens where they can set up multiple bins, most of us have small bathrooms. And beauty products are made from so many different materials—it can be very confusing.”

The DoSomething.org challenge asks young people on college campuses to make bins for bathrooms and start collecting. Once they have 10 pounds of empties, Garnier funds shipping to TerraCycle, which turns them into materials for playgrounds and gardens. The winner of the contest, who is asked to promote it on social media using an #empties hashtag, gets a $5,000 scholarship, as well as the chance to choose the location of one of the three Green Gardens Garnier intends to build with the TerraCycle materials this year. (It has already built such gardens in New York, Detroit, and New Orleans, and is planning to build three more this year, including one in partnership with Kroger, in Cincinnati.)