Sustainable salons: Ontario company allowing salons to dispose of waste more efficiently.

• Author: Myers, Ella
• Position: THUNDER BAY

Amanda Benincasa's business is beauty, and now her work beautifying people is keeping the environment beautiful too.

The owner of Evoke Salon and Spa--located in Thunder Bay--opened her doors three years ago, and was dismayed by the waste disposal options available to salons.

"As an owner, I started to become acutely aware of how much waste we were producing," said Benincasa. "When you're an employee you don't see how much waste is going out, and when I saw that, I thought there must be another way."

There was another way, and Benincasa found out about it through one of the reps from the Davines natural hair products she carries.

They introduced her to Green Circle Salons, a Toronto-based organization that provides sustainable waste management and recycling for salons and spas across North America.

Their mandate: to make the beauty industry sustainable by 2020.

Evoke has been a member of Green Circle Salons for a year now, and were recently recognized by the organization for the their commitment to sustainability. In their first nine months, they redirected around 75 per cent of their waste, totaling 459 pounds, that would otherwise have gone straight to regular landfills, or down the drain.

The program allows Evoke to recycle items like colour tubes, aerosol cans, and it accepts excess hair chemicals to divert them from being rinsed down the drain. They even repurpose hair cuttings and use them in booms --mats used in oil spill cleanups.

Shane Price, the CEO and founder of Green Circle Salons, came to his own environmental epiphany in much the same way as Benincasa, but from sitting in the chair, not behind it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"I noticed all the salon waste going into a black garbage bag, and I asked the owner if there wasn't something better they could do," said Price. "He said no, the city of Toronto doesn't take x-y-z."

Price set out to remedy that, launching the program in Toronto in 2009.

By 2012, Green...