ECO REPORT LUSH GREEN HUB
INSIDE LUSH’S NEW GREEN HUB
Is this beauty’s greenest space? How the ethical brand is taking control of waste
all of its trash into treasure. Not that Lush is responsible for generating much trash. For nearly 30 years, the proudly “by hippies, for hippies” brand has pioneered packaging-free beauty via innovations like shampoo bars, which Lush co-founder and product guru Mo Constantine developed all the way back in 1988, seven years before Lush’s official founding.
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The upshot is that just 2% of the company’s total carbon footprint is taken up by packaging and where packaging can’t be avoided, Lush’s aim is to make it recycled, organic or regenerative. To this end – and to ensure that everything from point-of-sale decor to
ECOREPORT
estled in close proximity to Lush’s manufacturing facilities in Poole, Dorset, is a newly-opened site turning
spa towels are being properly treated post-use – Lush created the Green Hub, which officially launched in May. Technically, there has been a Lush Green Hub since 2015, housing the brand’s original plastic granulator. Now newly-refurbished and dubbed the “granny granulator”, the machine is devoted to grinding down Lush’s signature black polypropylene (PP) pots for reuse. And the granny granulator 2.0 has extensive company. Lush invested £2.3m to relocate the Green Hub to its new premises and, at 40,000sqft, today’s Green Hub is three times the size of its previous incarnation. Racks are stacked high with electrical items for repairs and maintenance, with Lush revealing that it has repaired 700 electrical items to prevent the need to buy new since operations began in 2022. “There is an amazing team of engineers that will look after all 20 of our factories – over there past the front door – and all of the machinery inside them,” Eloise Flinter, Green Hub Business Development Manager at Lush, explained during a tour of the facility.
20 June 2023
“That’s 300 pieces of machinery, which we’re ensuring we’re keeping alive and not replacing with new. “This racking is full of items and machinery that have been used in manufacturing, which have broken and have been sent to the guys to be repurposed and repaired.”
In addition to an on-site woodshop team, whose carpenters create all of the furniture that goes into Lush’s 100 stores in the UK, the warehouse incorporates £50,000 worth of racking to provide a temporary home for previously-used decor, including bathtubs and Christmas trees. Meanwhile, products which are past
Lush’s self-imposed freshness policy (all products must leave manufacturing within 28 days of being made) but within their use-by-date are kept at the Hub before being donated to charities, community groups and those in need.
FEEL THE GRIND
A department that Lush has moved into the Green Hub is its moulds department, primarily for ease of recycling.
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