CosmoBiz Magazine June 2017 | Page 56

Business X I n our April 2016 issue, we featured Canadi- an-based company, GreenCircle Salons and inter- viewed founder and CEO, Shane Price, who gave us every detail he could about the company and the benefits the company promises for both the salon and the environment. GreenCircle Salons is a company that aims to make the salon industry sustainable by the year 2020. Price started the company in 2009 in Toronto, Canada to look for ways to help salons be genuinely green, generate revenues as part of the program, and help bring in cli- ents with an app called My Green Salon. They started with a case study of 20 salons in 2009 to see how the program would work and in 2010, they started to bring in their first salons. In 2016, Price told us that they have over a thousand salons in every community province in Canada and have also offered to every US based salon. With a program called Hair Mail, salons package waste materials in a box and have GreenCircle’s 24- hour logistics company pick up the box and ship it to their warehouses located in British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto, Chicago and Seattle. From there, the segrega- tion process begins and every bit of waste is properly disposed of or put to good use. The separated waste is recycled or repurposed to either aid in cleaning the environment or to create materials such as composite boards. For example, hair is collected and packed to- 56 C O S M O B I Z S A L O N J U N E 2 0 1 7 gether in used nylon stocking to create oil booms. These oil booms are used to absorb the oil from oil spills, thus saving the environment from the effects that these inci- dents can have. GreenCircle only requires a small Environmental Stewardship Fee of $2 for every single receipt from a paying customer. A portion of that $2 goes to Green- Circle to cover the costs of running the program, while the remainder goes to what they call a Green Change Purse that allows salons to reinvest in technology to