LG Chem, Innerbottle to take recycling to your doorstep

Innerbottle's recyclable packages for beauty products [LG CHEM]

LG Chem is partnering with a local start-up to establish a system where plastic bottles are collected directly from customers and completely recycled.

On Tuesday, the company signed an agreement with Innerbottle to collaborate on the project. Established in 2017, Innerbottle makes packaging for beauty products. Instead of just using a typical plastic bottle, Innerbottle’s packaging puts a silicon pouch inside the bottle to hold the actual product.

Because the silicon pouch is what comes into direct contact with the substance, the outer bottle covering the pouch can be completely reused without the additional process of having it cleaned. The silicon pouch also allows customers to use all of the beauty product without losing a residue stuck inside the corners of a typical plastic bottle.

According to LG, this left-over substance is one factor that made recycling difficult for beauty products.

To protect the cosmetics, beauty products typically use strong plastic bottles that are hard to recycle. Every year, more than 15 billion plastic bottles are created as waste from beauty products and recycling 10 percent of them could have the effect of reducing 75,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, LG says.

LG Chem’s role in the partnership with the start-up will be supplying ecofriendly material for the outer bottles. Post-consumer recycled materials, for example, are capable of being completely degraded into liquid form so they can be remade into another form of plastic packaging.

The two companies will also jointly develop ways to substitute the inner silicon pouch with LG’s nitrile butadiene latex, which requires less material to produce.

Apart from ecofriendly material, the partnership includes establishing a system where they can collect used bottles from consumers’ homes and have them automatically categorized for reuse.

“The recycling system will be first applied to Innerbottle’s beauty packaging from this year’s second half,” LG said in a statement. “From there, we will expand the application to food and medical packaging as well.”

BY SONG KYOUNG-SON [song.kyoungson@joongang.co.kr]