Charity Pot

When you purchase a LUSH Charity Pot Hand and Body Lotion, 100% of the retail price (minus taxes) goes directly to charities in need of support.

We donate all the proceeds to carefully selected charities around the world, focusing on those that support animal rights, environmental protection and humanitarian concerns.

Thanks to your support, we're able to expand our Charity Pot program and add new charities throughout the year. Click here to find out more about our Charity Pot projects.

Help us find partners to fund! If you know of an environmental, humanitarian or animal welfare group that might be a perfect fit for LUSH, email us at: charitypot@lush.com.

Solid Products

Solid products last longer and weigh less than bottled liquids which take more energy to transport. For example, one truckload of LUSH solid shampoo bars is enough for about 800,000 washes. It would take 15 truckloads of liquid shampoo to do the same job.

If 1 in 5 people in the US switched from liquid shampoo to solid, about 22 million plastic bottles would be saved from the landfill. On top of this, 6 million tonnes of preserved shampoo would be prevented from entering the environment.

Art of Bathing

At LUSH you'll notice that we prefer naked products over packaging (it's all trash really). However, when it comes to gifts, we want them to be beautiful to look at and exciting to open up and we love our beautiful boxes! The carefully chosen products inside speak for themselves. Our beautiful gift wrap paper and paper ribbons are made from 100% post-consumer waste. You can continue the giving by re-using on another gift or, if you’ve ripped it in the excitement you can pop it in the recycling bin to be reincarnated next year.

Cello bags keep products safe in transit. Made from renewable wood-pulp sourced from managed plantations and certified for industrial and home composting, you can re-use them to store your products or pop them in your bin to decompose. We proudly use Bio-foam Enviro-fill to pack up all of our gifts. It’s made from corn, wheat and potato starch (all renewable and abundant resources) and dissolves in water. Reuse it or put it in your compost! Our packing tape is fully recyclable, tamperproof, tamper-evident, and is stronger per square inch than polypropylene (the old plastic stuff).

Our Plastic Packaging

Our liquid products are snugly packaged in a 100% recycled PET bottle. We save around 90 tonnes of virgin plastic a year by putting our liquid products in recycled packaging. Please pop it in your recycling bin to keep the cycle going.

Our creams are put in pots made up of 100% recycled plastic. In their past life, the plastic used to be lids for drinks bottles. Wash your pots when they are empty and keep them safe. If you bring 5 into one of our shops, we’ll reward your efforts with a FREE pot of one of our lovely fresh face masks.

Recycling

The total recycled content in all LUSH packaging is about 89% (including paper bags, aluminium tins, gift wrap, ribbons, boxes, tags and inserts). That means that for every ton of material bought by LUSH, 900kg come from recycled sources.

Our pots and bottles are made with 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic, saving about 65 tons of CO2 and 90 tonnes of virgin plastic, or 800 barrels of oil, each year.

Our tins are made of 100% recycled aluminum and do a fine job or transporting your balms and naked bars wherever they may travel. Our carrier bags are made with 100% post-consumer recycled paper, saving 100 tonnes of CO2 each year. They’re now 2 grams lighter too which reduces emissions even more.

The small yellow paper bags we use in our shops to put Bath Bombs and other products in are made from 100% recycled paper. Close the link and recycle them when you’re done.

The signs in our shops are made from 100% recyclable polystyrene. They are printed using eco-solvent ink on an ECO-UV ink printer. It might sound like no big deal, but it’s taken us years to get to this point. Our printers searched far and wide for eco-friendly sign solutions and purchased this state-of-the-art printer to make signs just for us. We’re one of just a few companies in Canada using these ECO-UV ink printers. The signs for our light boxes (the bright box that hangs in our shop windows) are now 100% recyclable, as well as the clings that we put up in our windows.

LUSH Manufacturing

At LUSH we’re always searching for ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Here are just a few things we do in our Vancouver factory in an attempt to minimize our imprint on the earth:

We make our Bath Bombs with a mould made of recycled plastic. We re-use them as many times as we can before recycling them ourselves. We installed motion sensors in our change rooms to save electricity. When someone walks in, the lights turn on and so does a timer. After three minutes, the lights will go out. If you can reduce just four hours of light usage per day, you can noticeably reduce your carbon footprint over the year. We also put a shower into our change rooms to encourage staff to bike to work.

We have large compost bins outside our factory for all the seeds, pits and peels leftover from making our products (and eating our lunches!). We use compostable cheesecloth to cover our bins of product, so the product is kept clean and dust-free, and the cheesecloth "lid" can then be composted. We even encourage our business neighbours to use our compost bin!

All the bins and totes we use to carry ingredients and products around are made of recycled plastic, and we use them over and over again. We do not use plastic bubble wrap in our factory. We have a machine that crumples up 100% recycled paper, making it puffy and perfect for packing up product with. When a shipment arrives to shops, they’re able to recycle everything from the box the product arrive in, to the packing, and soon they’ll be able to recycle the tape used to close up the box (we’re working on that one!). We ship everything in North America by land (except for when we have to ship things to Hawaii – then we don’t have the land option).

LUSH Times

Our catalogs represent our greatest consumption of paper fibre. We feel a responsibility for all the pages we create and strive to make their production as environmentally sustainable as we can. We print our catalogs with vegetable-based inks which are less toxic than chemical inks and we're using paper that contains approximately 30% recycled content. For all our publications and print materials we look for recycled paper made with a high amount of post-consumer waste content (paper diverted from landfills through home and office recycling programs) while maintaining high quality standards and reasonable cost efficiency.

Naked Products

When it comes to packaging it's very easy to sound puritanical but here at LUSH, while we really love ribbons, bows and bells, we prefer to spend our money on top quality ingredients instead. Our greatest love is to invent products with no packaging at all. When we can’t eliminate it completely, we look for the simplest packaging to do the job and use post-consumer recycled, recyclable and biodegradable materials whenever possible.

You can buy about 70% of our products naked, including Bath Bombs, shampoo bars, bubble bars, massage bars, body butters and solid facial cleansers, deos, Emotibombs and sugar scrubs.

Green Bathroom

1 Think About What You Really Need Learn about cosmetics ingredients and their effects. Read product labels. Avoid ingredients that are not beneficial to you or that are harmful to the environment. Ask for samples so you can try a product for a few days to help you make the right choices. The single most eco-friendly thing you can do is avoid collecting half-used bottles of products that weren't right for your needs.

2 Use Solid, Unpackaged Products Choose bar soap instead of shower gel or liquid soap. Use shampoo bars instead of bottled shampoo and solid massage bars instead of massage oil. These are all better for the environment as there is little or no packaging. Solid products also contain no water and therefore need no environmentally-damaging preservatives.

3. Check for A Use-By Date No use-by date usually means that the product is heavily preserved. (Read the ingredient label and you'll see...) More preservatives down the drain are bad for the environment.

4 Avoid Disposables Look for personal hygiene products with extended life spans such as toothbrushes and razors with disposable heads. If you only replace the head you are throwing less away.

5 Explore Water Recycling Systems When you have a bath, make the most of it! Take at least 45 minutes out of your schedule to relax and unwind. Even better, share your bath with your partner. When you're finished, try recycling your bath water. You can use it to water your house plants, garden or lawn. Your begonias will thank you.

6 Don't Leave the Tap On When you shave, brush your teeth, or even shower, only turn on the water when absolutely necessary: at the beginning and the end. While you're soaping yourself or when brushing, stop gallons of water rushing down the drain needlessly by turning off the tap.

7 Recycle Your Plastics Most of us are already in the habit of recycling containers like water bottles and milk jugs but we don't always remember that most of our bathroom containers can be recycled too. Just be sure to wash them first. If you don't, they can contaminate the rest of your recycling and end up in a landfill. Plus, for every 5 black LUSh pots you return to you local shop you can pick up a free Fresh face mask!

8 Shop With A Lower Carbon Footprint Whenever you shop for cosmetic products, take your own reusable bag. Buy local products when possible (look at the label, was it made locally or air freighted in from afar?) and avoid buying products with excessive packaging (remember that sometimes the contents cost less than the packaging). Reduce your carbon footprint even more by walking or cycling to the shops. At the very least, take public transportation or carpool.

9 Save Water from going down the Loo Leave a water bottle filled with sand in the back of your toilet tank. This displaces the water so it takes less every time you flush. And remember; if it's yellow, let it mellow. Every flush uses gallons of water, so if you flush every other pee, you'll be saving thousands of gallons of water per year.

10 Use Green cleaning products Using conventional cleaning products in the bathroom exposes you and the environment to hundreds of harmful chemicals. By choosing 'Green' cleaning products, your bathroom comes just as clean, but you won't be inhaling toxins or contributing to environmental problems. When LUSH first started in the U.K, it was one of the few companies to list their ingredients on labels. Though there was no law saying it had to, LUSH was just incredibly proud of their formulations! Now in the U.K, and in North America it is mandatory to quantitatively list ingredients on cosmetics, and we are still very proud to do so.