One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to deal productively with excessive or unrecyclable packaging. I purchase milk in glass bottles and I am able to return the bottle to the store to be reused, but I can’t recycle the plastic lid through my city’s recycling program. I can recycle my glass or plastic bottles, but not the flip-top caps. I can recycle my peanut butter jar, but not the jar’s lid. These caps are thrown in the garbage and end up all over our communities, rivers, streams and oceans. Birds and other creatures mistake them for food with heartbreaking consequences.

But I’ve discovered a solution.

Now I can stop by my local Aveda Salon and drop off my milk caps, shampoo caps, flip-top caps and jar lids into the Aveda Cap Recycling program box located in the store lobby. The Aveda Cap Recycling program accepts caps that are “rigid plastic, sometimes noted with a #5 in the chasing arrows recycling symbol. This includes caps that twist on with a threaded neck such as caps on shampoo, water, soda, milk, other beverage bottles and pharmaceutical lids, flip-top caps on tubes and food product bottles (such as ketchup and mayonnaise), laundry detergents and some jar lids such as peanut butter.” They do not accept “non-rigid lids such as yogurt lids, tub lids (margarine, cottage cheese), and screw-on lids that are not rigid. Please do not include any metal lids or plastic pumps or sprayers.” If you have a question about a specific cap or lid, look at Aveda’s Cap Collection Guide. Within any recycling category, too much of the wrong materials can contaminate the recycling process, so make sure you’re only including acceptable caps and lids. To find a local Aveda salon, visit Aveda.com/templates/door/locator.tmpl. This is just one more easy way we can make a difference.