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The Beauty Industry Creates 40 Million Tons of Waste Annually. These Brands Are Hoping To Fix That
Andrea Clemett
Andrea Clemett works with dot.LA's social production team. A Los Angeles native, Andrea previously worked as a staff writer for the San Clemente Times where she focused on new businesses and green issues. When she's not chasing stories, she can be found chasing swells along the California coast.
It's no coincidence wellness brands often build momentum on the West Coast. The combination of pristine coastlines and the city breeds an infectious admiration for the environment and an ecosystem for sustainable businesses to thrive.
The irony, of course, is that the beauty industry generates 120 billion units of packaging every year globally—most of which are not truly recyclable. But last year, California toughened the state's recycling system by cracking down on plastic pollution and requiring businesses to recycle at least 30% of packaging by 2028.
That presents a major obstacle for the beauty industry where most products — lipsticks, lotions, eyeshadow cases and plastic tubes — typically drop through the screen in a municipal recycling facility and end up in landfills and the ocean, says Wende Zomnir, co-founder of Caliray, a Newport Beach-based personal care startup.
In other words, the developing trend of curbside recycling infrastructure, where consumers return their empty containers back to the store, has yet to address its inability to process smaller materials. And the waste missed in these facilities contributes to over 40 million tons of garbage generated by Californians annually.
"We're exploring all kinds of options in terms of sustainable materials, and when we find what we like, we roll with it. And we'll try something else next time because all of this stuff is so new," Zomnir told dot. L.A. "The goal is to get this brand to a size where we're starting to make sustainability a real part of the conversation because people say they care about it. But until it's like front and center and a thing, you're not going to get momentum from other brands. There's just not going to be the pressure."
Although some of Caliray’s products cannot be recycled curbside due to their small size, they are eligible for processing through a third-party packaging collection program called PACT Collective based in San Francisco. The nonprofit organization accepts hard-to-recycle items produced by the beauty industry.
The PACT facility documents and sorts each container for secondary use of the material, and what’s left over, gets incinerated. The company acknowledges its eventual goal to phase out reliance on specialty programs and develop new methods for curbside packaging or reuse.
PACT has a handful of drop-off receptacles with Los Angeles partners, mail-back programs with participating members or consumers can ship directly to the company by paying $8 for a return envelope.
Jenna Dover, the co-founder of Caliray, describes herself as a design junkie who intentionally creates products that will be recycled or downsized. Through Caliray’s website, consumers can buy a prepaid shipping label and mail their empty beauty containers to PACT, she adds.
But even as third-party vendors have gained traction with industry professionals, consumers are still in the education stage of understanding the complexities of packaging materials and beauty waste, Zomnir says. Though she anticipates waste will get to a tipping point where consumers get into the routine of sending away their beauty packaging, they’re not there yet.
To that end, Victor Casale, co-founder and president of PACT Collective says that brands are beginning to look at sustainability downstream of the product's end cycle rather than focusing on the upstream of development like natural sourcing, ingredients toxicity, and the absence of child labor or animal testing, Casale says.
“My personal feeling is we should not be competing on sustainability. We should be sharing systems on sustainability initiatives,” Casale adds. “We have found at PACT that our program is best suited for startups and indie brands because they generally can't afford expertise or access to design and material information.”
While more prominent brands are also tuning into sustainable practices, Casale says, the process takes longer to onboard due to the global legacy of policies and systems. Change may take longer than a company creating a sustainable approach from its infancy.
“When brands reach out to us, we give them a ton of information on what can be recycled,” Casale says. “We purposely made it so indie brands can be members and learn because they're the future companies that are going to be the big, multinationals in the future. And we want to make sure that they get started off on the right foot.”
That said, last year personal care and beauty retail giant Sephora piloted a partnership with PACT called 'Beauty (Re)Purposed' in 23 Sephora locations in the U.S. geared for consumers to bring in their empty containers. Other veteran Southern California beauty brands like female-founded Ilia and Prima have also pledged to provide a mailback recycling program through PACT. Zomnir says, however, that Sephora still has yet to announce its future plans with PACT. But if it does, she anticipates the partnership will make a huge impact to move the needle.
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Andrea Clemett
Andrea Clemett works with dot.LA's social production team. A Los Angeles native, Andrea previously worked as a staff writer for the San Clemente Times where she focused on new businesses and green issues. When she's not chasing stories, she can be found chasing swells along the California coast.
LA’s Upgrade in Travel and NBA Viewing
08:41 AM | July 26, 2024
Image Source: Los Angeles World Airports
🔦 Spotlight
Exciting developments are underway for Los Angeles as the city prepares for major upgrades in both travel and entertainment. The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners has approved an additional $400 million for the Automated People Mover (APM) at LAX, increasing its total budget to $3.34 billion. This boost ensures the elevated train’s completion by December 8, 2025, with service starting in January 2026. For Angelenos, this means a significant improvement in travel convenience. The APM will streamline connections between parking, rental car facilities, and the new Metro transit station, drastically cutting traffic congestion around the airport. Imagine a future without the dreaded 30-minute traffic delays at LAX! The APM will operate 24/7, reducing airport traffic by 42 million vehicle miles annually and carrying 30 million passengers each year, while also creating thousands of local jobs and supporting small businesses.
Meanwhile, the NBA is also making waves with its new broadcasting deals. The league has signed multi-year agreements with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video, marking a notable shift in media partnerships. ESPN will maintain its long-standing role, NBC returns as a network broadcaster after years away, and Amazon Prime Video will provide NBA games through its streaming platform. Starting with the 2025-2026 season, these deals will enhance the league's reach and revenue, aligning with the NBA's goal to expand its audience and adapt to evolving viewing habits. Whether you're catching the action on TV or streaming online, these changes promise to elevate the fan experience and bring more basketball excitement to Los Angeles.
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Companies
- Pearl, a startup that makes AI-powered software that assists dentists in identifying cavities, gum disease, and other dental conditions, raised a $58M Series B funding led by Left Lane Capital with Smash Capital, and others also participating. - learn more
LA Venture Funds
- Fulcrum Venture Group participated in a prior $3.5M Pre-Seed Round for Code Metal, a developer tools startup. - learn more
- B Capital co-led a $12.5M Seed Round for Star Catcher, a startup that aims to develop a space-based grid that captures solar energy in space and distributes it to satellites and other space assets. - learn more
- Mantis VC and Amplify participated in a $140M Series C for Chainguard, an open source security startup. - learn more
- Prominent LA venture capitalist, Carter Reum and wife, Paris Hilton, participated in a $14M Seed/Series A for W, the men’s personal care brand from Jake Paul. - learn more
LA Exits
- Warner Bros. Games acquired Player First Games, developer of the recently launched MultiVersus free-to-play platform fighter videogame. - learn more
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Dental Startup Pearl Gets FDA Clearance for AI-Powered X-Ray Platform
04:57 PM | March 08, 2022
Courtesy of Pearl
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A West Hollywood-based startup has received Food and Drug Administration clearance for what it calls the first artificial intelligence-enabled product that can read dental x-rays and identify cavities, plaque and other dental conditions.
Second Opinion is an AI detection platform created by Pearl, a dentistry startup founded in 2019 to leverage machine learning and AI to help dentists detect problems in otherwise healthy teeth. The startup raised $11 million in Series A funding in 2019 from Craft Ventures and Santa Monica-based Crosscut Ventures.
To develop Second Opinion, Pearl gathered over 100 million dental x-rays from dental practices and academic institutions. The AI platform points out discrepancies found in an x-ray and also serves as a patient communication tool, allowing dentists to show different models of a patient’s teeth and point out problem areas.
“I do think that this is going to become very fundamental to the category [of dentistry] very quickly, and therefore will actually serve as a model for the rest of medicine—for how to infuse and deploy a AI widely at scale, with the ultimate benefit and potential of really elevating the standard of care in a provable way,” Pearl founder and CEO Ophir Tanz told dot.LA.
Pearl’s AI program examine teeth.Courtesy of Pearl
The FDA’s clearance comes amid ongoing skepticism from some within the medical community about the effectiveness of AI applications. A presentation made by the American College of Radiology to the FDA in 2020 reported that 95% of clinicians thought AI was too inconsistent or inaccurate to be used by medical practices. Though the FDA is the largest regulatory body in health care, it has no consistent framework for signing off on a piece of AI that can guide diagnostics, such as the number of reference images used, the diversity of its dataset or its accuracy rate. This has slowed down the clinical adoption rate of such technologies—and while the FDA has proposed a framework to address some of these challenges, nothing has been implemented yet.
Second Opinion’s journey to receiving FDA clearance involved a multi-year process to test every single use case that the platform is trained to do—such as identifying tooth decay, plaque, bone lesions around a tooth and a handful of other discrepancies in otherwise-healthy teeth. Receiving FDA clearance entails a separate and different process than receiving FDA approval; while the former indicates that a product is as good as existing alternatives already on the market, the latter requires a different set of processes for more novel or riskier products to prove that their benefits outweigh potential drawbacks. Tanz noted that the FDA sought only clearance for Second Opinion, and neither required nor asked for approval to allow the product to be marketed in the U.S.
A patient goes under the lights in the dentist’s office.Courtesy of Pearl
Though some critics claim that AI can’t pick up on certain nuances that a human dentist might, Pearl contends that those critics often fail to account for the counter-argument of human error. Through the nonprofit Dental AI Council, the startup commissioned a study that found when presenting a panel of 136 dentists with an X-ray to review, roughly half of them found a cavity, while the other half found none.
Tanz said he is not interested in expanding Pearl’s services into radiology at large, and acknowledged that bottlenecks in the FDA process make it harder to develop, clear and adopt similar technology. Already, the startup has received regulatory approvals from Canada, Australia, the U.K., the European Union and the United Arab Emirates, and is working with roughly 4,000 dental organizations and radiograph manufacturers.
“We think of this as a utility, kind of like water or power,” Tanz said. “You're not going to have any dental practice where this is not going to be powering the radiographic side of things… We really do believe that this will be integrated into every practice in the world in a relatively short period of time.”
Update, March 10: This article has been updated to clarify the difference between FDA clearance and FDA approval, and to specify that Pearl's Second Opinion product did not require FDA approval to be marketed in the U.S.
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Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la
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