Waste management company MYGroup has partnered with Retailer Selfridges to introduce a nationwide beauty and cosmetics recycling scheme in the UK, allowing customers to return used products, including hard-to-recycle fragrance bottles.
The programme, called Reselfridges Recycle, is now available at all Selfridges Beauty Halls in Birmingham, Manchester and London’s Oxford Street, which attracts more than 20 million visitors each year.
Customers receive a Selfridges Unlocked Key, a digital loyalty point in the retailer’s membership programme, for every five items recycled.
Fragrance bottles are often excluded from kerbside recycling and other in-store take-back schemes due to residual hazardous contents and mixed packaging materials. The new scheme allows customers to return perfume, aftershave and other fragrance bottles in full, even if they still contain product.
Complex waste
Used fragrance bottles and other beauty and cosmetic items from any brand can be deposited in Reselfridges collection boxes across all stores. A full list of eligible products and any exclusions is available from Selfridges.
MYGroup, which holds permits to process hazardous and complex waste streams, manages the collection and processing of returned items at its specialist facility in Hull, East Yorkshire.
Packaging materials and residual cosmetic product are recovered and returned to supply chains, or remanufactured into new products through its ReFactory operation, avoiding landfill and incineration.
Steve Carrie, group director at MYGroup, said: “MYGroup has been working with retailers for many years to make beauty take-back a practical, scalable cornerstone of the sector’s commitment to recycling.
“Through our schemes, we’ve now processed more than 40,000 tonnes of returned beauty and cosmetic packaging. Success and experience that has helped shape this ambitious Reselfridges collaboration.
‘Captured at scale’
Fragrance recycling highlights why this experience matters, Carrie said.
“These products are used at scale but are typically binned after use,” he added. “Through Reselfridges, we’re applying our established take-back solution in a department store environment, where even the hardest-to-recycle items can be captured at scale in meaningful volumes and recovered safely.”
The nationwide launch follows a trial at Selfridges Trafford Centre in 2025, during which the number of Unlocked Keys collected rose by 271 per cent between September and November.
MYGroup said its retail take-back schemes play an important role nationwide in capturing materials that household recycling systems are not designed to manage, particularly as brand owners and retailers adapt to new Extended Producer Responsibility requirements.
