Cosmax announced Friday it has signed an MOU with Market Balgyeon, a social venture specializing in upcycling, to carry out a joint upcycling project. [Cosmax]
Cosmax announced Friday it has signed an MOU with Market Balgyeon, a social venture specializing in upcycling, to carry out a joint upcycling project. [Cosmax]

Cosmax partners with upcycling firm to repurpose lab waste

Discarded coats, aprons and containers transformed into artworks

Resource-circulation drive to expand across all business operations

Worn lab coats, aprons and plastic containers from a cosmetics research facility have found new life as works of art. Cosmax, a global cosmetics original design manufacturer, has launched a project to turn waste generated during its research process into artworks and use them in resource-circulation education.

Cosmax announced Friday it has signed an MOU with Market Balgyeon, a social venture specializing in upcycling, to carry out a joint upcycling project.

The two companies held the signing ceremony Thursday at Ground333, a mixed-use cultural venue in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province, on the sidelines of "Discovery;Circulation — Upcycle Art Fair with Cosmax."

More than 8,000 new products are developed each year at Cosmax's Research & Innovation Center. The process generates a wide range of waste materials, including containers used in experiments, bulk drums of raw ingredients, and the aprons and lab coats worn by researchers.

The MOU focuses on giving those research-and-development byproducts a new purpose. Upcycling adds design and function to discarded materials to transform them into new products or works of art.

Market Balgyeon, the partner firm, is a social venture founded in 2018 that specializes in upcycling. It has converted waste materials into educational and arts content, completing roughly 970,000 upcycling projects and running about 400 related workshops to date.

Under the agreement, Cosmax plans to supply its lab waste on a regular basis to schools and institutions for educational and artistic activities. The company also intends to support the development of upcycling artists and the exhibition of their work, while expanding its resource-circulation efforts beyond research and development to cover manufacturing, office operations and all other areas of the business.

The project is part of an open-innovation support program run by the Gyeonggi Social Economy Institute, which Cosmax has participated in since last year.

"Seeing lab coats and containers that have served their purpose in the research center come back to life through education and art is the most intuitive demonstration of the value of resource circulation," a Cosmax official said. "Starting with this partnership, we will broaden our resource-circulation activities across all areas of the business and build a sustainable cosmetics ecosystem through environmental management that engages with the local community."


hong@heraldcorp.com