Walk into almost any hair salon in the UK and you will find aluminium.

It is wrapped around highlights, squeezed into colour tubes and used in product packaging. Every day, huge quantities of salon metals pass through our hands.

The problem is what happens next.

Despite aluminium being incredibly recyclable, Green Salon Collective estimates that only around 2% of salon metals are currently being recycled through specialist salon recycling, leaving approximately 98% outside this specialist recycling stream.

That means an enormous quantity of valuable metal is still being treated as waste.

How much aluminium does the UK hairdressing industry use?

The numbers become staggering when we look beyond one salon.

There are around 50,000 hair and beauty businesses across the UK, carrying out millions of colour services every year.

A typical foil based colour service can easily use around 50 individual foils.

Based on our industry estimates for the number of women receiving professional hair colour services and an illustrative average of five salon colour appointments per year, UK salons could be using around 2.2 billion individual hairdressing foils every year.

That is:

2,200,000,000 foils. Every year.

And that figure does not include colour tubes, aerosol cans and the other metals used throughout the professional hair industry.

Individually, one foil weighs almost nothing.

Across an entire industry, those tiny pieces of aluminium become a significant material stream.

Only a fraction is being captured

This is where the biggest opportunity lies.

Green Salon Collective estimates that approximately 98% of UK salon metals are still not being captured through specialist salon recycling, with only around 2% currently recycled through these routes.

The good news is that we know specialist recycling works.

Green Salon Collective members have already recycled salon metals representing waste from an estimated 4 million colour services.

Using an illustrative average of 50 foils per service, that is equivalent to around 200 million individual foils from those colour services alone.

It proves that the material can be captured.

We simply need more salons to do it.

What happens when salon metals are thrown away?

Once used foils and colour tubes are put into general waste, salons lose control over what happens to them.

Depending on the waste system, general waste may be sent to landfill or incineration rather than being recycled.

That matters because aluminium is not a disposable material.

It is an incredibly valuable resource that can be recycled repeatedly without losing its fundamental qualities. The International Aluminium Institute describes aluminium as almost infinitely recyclable, with no loss of material quality.

A highlighting foil might only be needed for part of a colour appointment.

The aluminium itself could have a useful life far beyond that service.

Putting it into general waste turns a potentially circular material into waste after just one use.

Why can salon foil not simply go into normal recycling?

This is one of the biggest misconceptions around salon metal recycling.

Aluminium is recyclable, but that does not mean every recycling collection will accept every type of aluminium.

Used salon foils are often covered in colour residue. Colour tubes can contain residual product and other materials such as plastic caps.

Standard council or commercial recycling services may not be equipped to accept these contaminated salon metals. Putting them into a recycling bin without checking that they are accepted can become wishcycling.

Specialist salon recycling provides a route designed specifically for these materials.

With Green Salon Collective, used foils do not need to be washed before being collected for specialist processing. Colour tubes can also be collected, with plastic caps removed.

Recycling aluminium versus making new aluminium

Perhaps the most compelling reason to recycle salon metals is what it can replace.

New aluminium starts with bauxite mining.

Bauxite must be extracted from the ground, refined into alumina and then smelted to produce aluminium. This requires considerable energy and can also create environmental pressures through land disturbance, water use, emissions and waste from processing.

Recycling aluminium is dramatically different.

According to the International Aluminium Institute, recycling aluminium can require up to 95% less energy than producing aluminium from bauxite.

Put another way, recycled aluminium can require only around 5% of the energy associated with primary production.

That is why recycling a foil is about much more than keeping something out of the bin.

Every time existing aluminium is recovered and returned to circulation, it helps reduce our reliance on extracting and processing virgin resources.

From used salon foil to useful metal

When salon foil is collected through Green Salon Collective, it goes through a remelting process.

The process removes coatings and residual hair colour, leaving molten aluminium that can be formed into large blocks known as ingots. The recovered aluminium can then return to manufacturing rather than being treated as waste.

Colour tubes can also be processed through specialist recycling routes capable of dealing with their higher levels of contamination.

So that crumpled foil sitting beside the colour bowl is not rubbish.

It is a raw material.

Imagine if the whole industry recycled its metals

This is where the opportunity becomes exciting.

Billions of foils are potentially being used by UK salons each year, alongside huge numbers of colour tubes and other metal items.

Right now, specialist recycling captures only a small proportion of that material.

Changing that does not require salons to stop colouring hair or abandon aluminium overnight.

It requires us to stop treating aluminium as disposable.

One salon separating its foils might feel small.

Hundreds of salons doing it starts to become significant.

Thousands of salons doing it could transform the way our industry thinks about waste.

How to recycle salon metals with Green Salon Collective

Green Salon Collective provides specialist recycling for salon metals including used hairdressing foils, colour tubes and empty product cans.

Your foils do not need to be scrubbed clean before recycling. Instead, they can be separated from general waste in the salon and collected through the appropriate recycling stream.

It is a simple change to what happens at the end of a colour service, but multiplied across thousands of appointments, the potential impact is enormous.

Your client's colour might last six weeks. The aluminium can last much longer.

The UK hairdressing industry uses an extraordinary amount of metal.

The question is whether we continue treating that metal as something disposable, or recognise it as a valuable resource worth keeping in circulation.

Recycling aluminium can use around 95% less energy than producing it from bauxite. Aluminium can be recycled repeatedly. And specialist recycling routes already exist for the foils and colour tubes salons use every day.

The aluminium is already in our salons.

We do not need to keep mining more of it just to throw the aluminium we already have away.

It is time to give salon metals another life.