Anna Peters, owner and founder of re:TREAT Color + Hair Design Studio in Old Town Clovis, opened her salon in 2016. Recently, she has been undergoing efforts to make her salon more eco-friendly by partnering with a new local company. Photo by Frank Lopez

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the March 13 print edition of The Business Journal.

When going to a barbershop or hair salon, one is more likely to have hair care on the mind than care for the natural environment.

For re:TREAT Color + Hair Design Studio, bringing eco-friendly changes to beauty-service businesses is part of the company’s culture.

According to Anna Peters, owner and founder of re:TREAT, her Clovis salon is one out of approximately 70 salons in a roughly 24-square-mile radius to offer more eco-friendly practices and products.

Born and raised in Clovis, Peters went away for college and graduated in 2003, returned to the Central Valley and then attended cosmetology school and received her license in 2004. She has been working in cosmetology for the 15 years since being licensed, and opened up re:TREAT in Old Town Clovis in the middle of 2016.

In your average hair salon, foils, hair color, smoothing treatments and actual hair itself is known to produce chemical buildup including hydrogen peroxide, formaldehyde, and methane gas — all of which effect groundwater and the air.

“This movement was something that was more of a mission on my part to be a responsible business owner,” Peters said. “It was something that I wanted to do from the get-go, but there were never resources available in our area.”

To save water, Peters had ECOHEADS shampoo nozzles installed, which increases water pressure, removes sediment, rust and sand, and reduces water and energy usage by up to 65%. Tourmaline stones in the nozzle put negative ions into the hair, which reduces frizz and blow-drying time, she said.

To reduce chemicals going back into the soil, water or air, re:TREAT offers eco-friendly products to purchase from Italian hair product company Davines, which has a focus on making products with sustainable beauty solutions.

Towards the end of 2019, Peters reached out to Green Beauty Waste, a new local company that offers its services to beauty and hair salons to safely dispose and limit hazardous waste from chemicals found in hair, products and dye.

Jordan Meyers, part owner at Green Beauty Waste, graduated from the Paul Mitchell Cosmetology School in 2016 and has been working in the industry since then, and owns her own studio, Hair By Jordan, near Fashion Fair Mall.

Meyers and her business partner and co-owner Lexie Brownrigg opened Green Beauty Waste in 2019, and they are the first to have this type of business in the area.

Meyers and Brownrigg teach their clients how to separate waste in bins, and they pick it up and transport it to a local disposal company.

Meyers said that most hair and beauty salons throw their waste into their own garbage dumpsters. Hair dye is considered a hazardous waste that is supposed to be disposed of in a hazardous waste facility.

“It’s a cycle — it’s going into the water treatment plants, things are getting watered by it,” Meyers said. “If you buy produce from many places in Fresno — the chemicals are in the food, or whatever they’re growing — because they are not filtering it out and they don’t know its there. If it doesn’t go to the sink or a landfill, it goes into the sewer systems and then the ocean.”

Re:TREAT was Green Beauty Waste’s first client, and they have since expanded to five other clients.

Re:TREAT will be hosting a Green (Open) house event on March 29 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. to teach the community, and other salon owners in the area, about hazardous waste and how to be part of the solution with new Green Beauty options and other eco-friendly companies.

“I hope that we continue to find better ways of servicing our clients and conducting our business in a more eco-friendly fashion,” Peters said. “We can constantly be improving and educating ourselves and finding more products that are sustainable.”