What Makes a Beauty Product Biodegradable?

When it comes to green label lingo, I'll admit that "biodegradable" is sometimes an afterthought for me, especially with beauty products. I tend to be so busy trying to figure out if a lotion or hair spray contains endocrine disrupting chemicals like phthalates, that I forget one of the most basic questions of green-ness, which crops up anytime you buy something new: What's going to happen to it when you're done?

And, the fact is, an awful lot of green and green-washed personal care products throw "biodegradable" on the label, usually around the same time they're telling you that it's made with organic aloe extract and so totally "natural." So you might be tempted to take it for granted that the organic personal care market has taken care of this one. You'd be wrong says this Associated Press story.

While the word "biodegradable" should mean that a product (as in, both the goo you put on your skin and the box or bottle it comes in) will break back down into nature within a reasonably short time frame, there aren't any government standards for how it degrades or how quickly that happens and no government agency requires manufacturers to formally verify their claims.

The good news: Some products (the article cites shampoo and detergents as examples) have always been biodegradable -- they're just telling you about it now that green is trendy. The bad news: If you're sending not-quite-empty bottles of shampoo to the landfill, those substances won't biodegrade all that quickly there because they don't get enough air and sunlight to do their business. Even worse: A lot of our beauty products don't go into the trash; they get washed down the drain when we shower, and end up contaminating rivers and streams. When that's the case, packing it up in a biodegradable box seems sort of besides the point.

A better bet: Look for the label "certified biodegradable" on soaps, as well as detergents and cleaners, which the Consumers Union rates as "highly meaningful." That means the product has been tested by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), an independent certifier, and at least 70 percent of the product biodegrades within 28 days after use. And think about how you can pare down your beauty routine to use fewer products. (I'm still working on this one myself!) Fewer products means fewer chemical exposures for you and our water, and fewer empty bottles in landfills.