If you simply throw away an empty shampoo bottle or body spray container, or sell it to a scrap dealer without crushing it, it will return to the store shelf a few days later, refilled.
Customers having no experience about “refilled” cosmetic products will buy those but they will be cheated because the containers are genuine but the material inside is fake. Shampoo sold in such bottles is produced by mixing colour and aromatic elements with cloth-washing chemicals usually used in garment factories.
Likewise, fake body spray is manufactured by mixing spirit, colour and aromatic components.
In a raid conducted at Malitola in Old Dhaka, RAB yesterday recovered 10 trucks full of such fake cosmetics.
They sealed 18 warehouses and factories where empty bottles and containers were being refilled. The refilled bottles were to be sent to thousands of cosmetic stores across the country where each of the items would be sold at a mere Tk10-15.
RAB mobile court fined two people Tk2 lakh each and also gave them a two-year sentence for their involvement in such business.
“The drive began around 11:30am. To traders, the place is known as the den of fake cosmetics factories,” said AHM Anwar Pasha, executive magistrate of RAB.
“The empty containers were collected from different parts of the country and were brought to the factories here,” he said, adding: “Md Hawlader and Md Sanwar Hawlader were subjected to fine and jail term.”
Hawlader confessed that he started working as a scrap collector in 1992 and got into the wholesale business of empty cosmetics containers 12 years later. He then started the fake cosmetics business.
“He said he got several others as partners. Together, they produced fake cosmetics,” said the RAB executive magistrate.
Hawlader would supply empty cans to other factories and he also owns a factory himself. The empty bottles are mainly collected by street urchins and homeless garbage collectors.
The refilled cosmetics are mainly sold in towns and rural areas where customers do not have much idea about fake cosmetics, said Pasha.