Our plastic free lip balms have been our best-selling products here at Valley Mist since day one, but have you ever wondered what is so brilliant and eco-friendly about the packaging that we do use? Or about the natural ingredients that are used to create them? In this blog post I will dive a bit deeper into the various eco-friendly properties of our bestselling plastic free lip balms.
Paperboard Tubes
The first and most obvious thing to notice about our plastic free lip balms is that many of them are packaged in paperboard, rather than plastic, tubes. These tubes are made out of 100% biodegradable paperboard. Paperboard is created from trees, making it a very renewable form of packaging and additionally meaning that it is extremely biodegradable. When Valley Mist first started using paperboard tubes as packaging for our bestselling lip balms Jο (our lovely Valley Mist founder) carried out a bit of an experiment of her own to see how well the paperboard tubes biodegraded over time in a chive pot. You can see more details of her experiment in her contemporary blog post here… But for a quick overview you can see the progression photos below:
Biodegradable non-toxic inks
In addition to biodegradable paperboard tubes, the labels on these tubes are also printed with biodegradable and non-toxic inks to aid the biodegrading process; there’s no point in having biodegradable packing if our inks aren’t just as eco-friendly! Furthermore, our paperboard tubes do not have separate labels stuck to them, instead the labelling is printed directly onto the tube to minimise waste material and use of non-biodegradable products.
Glass Packaging
So that’s the paperboard tubes, but you might also have seen some of our lip balms are packaged in glass jars. These lip balms are our value lip balms which are priced at a slightly lower price point than our paperboard lip balms, making sure that there is an option for everyone! These lip balms are still plastic free, except from a very small plastic disk in the aluminium lid that enables the lip balm to be properly sealed. However, this very tiny amount of plastic is still far far smaller than using entirely plastic packaging and the glass jar and aluminium lid are endlessly recyclable and can also be returned to Valley Mist via our glass returns scheme.
Natural Ingredients
In addition to biodegradable packaging, all of our plastic-free lip balms are made with 100% natural ingredients including: organic cocoa butter (derived from cocoa beans), organic sunflower seed oil, organic beeswax, mango seed butter, calendula (marigold) oil, various essential oils, organic shea butter and tocopherol (a form of vitamin E derived from soy beans or sunflower oil, which means many of our lip balms are vegan). As a result, all of our ingredients are also fully biodegradable and you can rest-assured knowing that the products you are using come from a 100% natural origin, many of which you can find in your own garden!
