Sugarcane-derived plastic has been included at low levels in CoverGirl Natureluxe Silk Foundation.

Eco-Friendly Packaging

‘Green’-ing Products Without Trade-Offs

An inside look at P&G Beauty & Grooming’s approach to sustainable beauty packaging.

Written by Jenny Rushmore, P&G Beauty & Grooming

At P&G Beauty & Grooming, we’ve built up our portfolio of brands including Pantene Pro-V, Olay and Gillette by focusing on deeply understanding our consumers, and creating innovation which meets their needs. So, like many others in the beauty industry, we’ve been increasingly hearing from consumers that they want “greener” products—and our sustainability and brand teams have been working on how we can do well as a business by doing good. We started by digging in to really understand what our consumers are asking for. Our research revealed that around 70% of people around the world say they’re looking for more environmentally friendly solutions. This could include products that are recyclable, made from more environmentally friendly materials, or contain specific ingredients. However, there’s an important caveat: Although consumers want to buy “greener” products, they’re currently not willing to trade-off either on performance or aesthetics, or to pay more. This is particularly important in the beauty industry, where much of the appeal of products is driven by packaging appearance, especially in categories like cosmetics and fine fragrances.

As a result, we adopted a “no trade-offs” mantra: Our sustainability improvements must either be invisible to the consumer, or enhance her experience—and not cost any more at the shelf. This can be a challenge! Many sustainable options available to manufacturers today come with cost up-charges or compromises in appearance or quality, but our packaging design teams keep the consumer at the heart of all of our innovation, because we know that we’ll only be successful if we meet her needs.

Packaging is an important part of meeting the consumer demand for greener products. We use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to understand the environmental footprint of our beauty products, looking across all stages of a product’s life from the raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, consumer use, through to the final disposal. Extensive LCAs across our beauty portfolio have revealed that after consumer use of our products (mostly due to hot water in the shower), packaging is frequently the second highest contributor to energy and carbon dioxide emissions. Using this data, we developed our packaging sustainability vision and a glidepath of goals to help us achieve it. While our packaging design team works on a wide range of projects, we decided to focus on the two areas where we could make the biggest environmental impact: packaging material reduction, and the use of renewable materials.

Top Priorities

Packaging material reduction is a top priority, because it’s almost always better to use less of a resource than find a substitute (similar to the case for energy efficiency). P&G has set the goal that we will use 20% less packaging per consumer use of products by 2020 (compared to 2010). Our design teams are already making progress across brands, with selected products on Pantene Pro-V in Asia, Gillette Fusion, and Olay Total Effects already reducing their packaging weight by at least 10%. The teams use modeling techniques to help eliminate unnecessary materials, such as the “Bottle Optimal Weight Software” which predicts how bottles will perform throughout the supply chain, allowing the bottles to be optimized to be as lightweight as possible. In addition, we use COMPASS, an LCA screening tool which allows teams to quickly assess the sustainability of new design proposals compared to old packaging, understand the environmental impacts for a wide range of indicators, and quickly find ways to optimize the packaging.

However, packaging reduction can only go so far, so our second focus area is on reducing the use of non-renewable materials and replacing them with renewable alternatives. P&G has set the long-term vision of using 100% renewable or recycled materials in all our products and packaging, and by 2020, we’ve pledged to replace 25% of petroleum-based materials with renewable alternatives. This is important for beauty packaging because of the widespread use of plastic, which is primarily made from non-renewable fossil fuels like petroleum. We have a team that is dedicated to finding renewable options which will meet our consumer needs without trade-offs. Importantly, they also evaluate all renewable materials for sustainability, as just because a material is renewable, doesn’t mean that it is automatically a better choice. We have a set of internal guidelines for evaluating the sustainability of renewable alternatives, considering aspects such as the recyclability of the material, and how it affects local ecosystems and biodiversity.

P&G Beauty & Grooming recently launched our first renewable material pilot in market, using packaging which includes sugarcane-derived plastic from Brazil. This material uses over 70% less fossil fuel than traditional petroleum-based plastic, and has over 170% lower greenhouse gas emissions, according to an LCA analysis. For consumers, it looks, feels and acts exactly the same as traditional plastic, and is just as recyclable as the current plastic bottles, so there’s no trade-offs. The plastic has been included at low levels in CoverGirl Natureluxe Silk Foundation, which is in stores in the U.S. now, and will be launching soon globally on Pantene Nature Fusion.

Sustainable packaging is an important part of sustainability in the beauty industry, and although there’s a long way to go in the journey, by taking a consumer-focused and science-based approach at P&G we believe it’s possible to make real progress.

About the Author

Jenny Rushmore is global sustainability director, P&G Beauty & Grooming.