Local hairdresser Karen Silk, a Bath Life finalist, urges salons throughout Bath and West Wilts to become more eco-conscious, and be careful about how much waste they produce and how it is disposed of.

Karen Silk prides herself on being eco-conscious, both at home and at work, and now she is asking other hairdressers in BANES to consider their own impact on the environment.

Karen encourages people to take ‘small steps’ when becoming more ecologically aware. One of Karen’s first steps was to change the products she used to colour hair. Often, hair dyes from larger colour houses are full of nasty toxic chemicals. Where do these go? Down the drain and into our water.

But it’s not just the chemicals used in hair-care that can impact the environment. The use of foils when dyeing hair has a dramatic effect on the natural world. Each salon uses, on average, 2 kilometres of foils every month.

Roughly 150,000,000 tonnes of waste goes to landfill every year, and debris from the beauty industry makes up a huge chunk of that. With every unrecycled shampoo bottle, every binned brush, and every piece of plastic packaging, the waste produced by salons really piles up.

Thankfully, there are companies like the Green Salon Collective, who help to dispose of this kind of waste in a safe and eco-friendly way. They even help to reduce the effect of the toxins used in dyes by disposing of them appropriately.

Karen’s journey has been captured on her blog, ‘The Ugly Side of Hairdressing’. On her blog she explores the world of eco-conscious hairdressing, giving in depth reviews and recommendations of new products, and offers advice on reducing your own footprint.

Check it out here:

https://www.karensilkhairdressing.co.uk/blog/

Words by Jonathan R Parsonage