Sustainability

Protecting the Environment

Steady, careful and measured progress is key to P&G Beauty & Grooming's success in developing environmentally-responsible and socio-economically sustainable prod­ucts and processes. P&G has long recognized that the journey to sustainability is an ongoing, constantly evolving effort. P&G has been committed to improving the sustainability of its products and processes since the 1970s. Through years of rigorous study, P&G has learned that in order to truly embrace sustainable practices, the company must employ a three-legged approach. Each of these three legs - environmental protection, economic development and social responsibility - play a key role in developing sustainable products and processes. Keeping all three areas in mind, P&G Beauty & Grooming employs scientific principles to make sustainability a part of every initiative.

Key areas in which environmental science is contributing to sustainable innovation in P&G Beauty & Grooming are the use of Life Cycle Assessment and Municipal Waste evaluations of ingredients as well as Municipal Waste evaluations of packaging.

While P&G Beauty & Grooming has already implemented several successful sustainable initiatives, the company continues to strive for improvement. In the area of environmental responsibility. For example, P&G Beauty & Grooming has reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 36 percent, energy usage by 28 percent and water usage by 23 percent per production unit in the past six years. Moving forward, P&G Beauty & Grooming will be critical to contributing to the total P&G sustainability goals of an additional 20 percent reduction in each of these areas by 2012. For more information, visit the P&G corporate commitment to sustainability.  

Life Cycle Assessment

P&G Beauty & Grooming scientists have adopted a systematic way to understand and assess the environmental impact of consumer products from the birth of a product to its disposal. This method, called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), allows scientists to determine where sustainable innovations can have the most impact in a product's development cycle. LCA is an analytical, computer modeling tool that allows scientists to account for many variables, spanning from the time a product is created until the moment the empty container is discarded. The analysis begins as early as the mining and harvest of raw materials and takes into account manufacturing methods, delivery of the product and final disposal of the packaging. It even includes the end point of consumer use, ranging from the water a man uses to rinse his razor to the bath run-off from a woman washing her hair.

P&G believes that being one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world comes with the responsibility of carefully implementing processes like LCA. As a big company, P&G is able to use its broad portfolio of brands to make significant improvements to the overall life cycle of many products.

Life Cycle Assessment allows scientists to take a "snapshot" of the entire life cycle of a product to systematically assess the impact of each step.

Municipal Waste - Ingredients

While most companies have an incentive to minimize waste in order to be cost-effective, P&G is proud to report that it uses over 96 percent of the raw materials it buys. Despite this achievement, the company realizes the importance of ensuring that whatever waste occurs is safe for the environment.

Long before a P&G Beauty & Grooming product is released, scientists anticipate where this waste material will go and how it will impact the environment. To conduct these studies, P&G Beauty & Grooming scientists utilize Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) science to determine the expected environmental concentration and potential for toxicity and bioaccumulation of chemicals that will be released.

The goal is to ensure that the concentra­tion of any product ingredient enter­ing the environment is significantly lower than the concentration that could be potentially harmful to people or surrounding ecosystems.

Ingredients enter the wastewater stream when they go down the drain and must be capable of removal by municipal wastewater treatment systems (or on-site, home treatment systems). Biodegradation, the natural breakdown and renewal of organic materials, is accelerated in these systems, so that the ingredients won't enter the receiving streams at significant concentrations. Other ingredients are absorbed by the sludge and are removed along with it for further treatment, providing additional time for degradation. P&G Beauty & Grooming scientists use laboratory tests and simula­tions to determine the biodegradability of product ingredients. These tests, such as the Ready Biodegradability Test and the 2008 OECD Wastewater Simulator Test series, were originally developed by P&G experts and are now widely used by com­panies and governments across the globe. Wastewater treatment plant »

Globally, P&G Beauty & Grooming and its partners collect vast amounts of data on the potential effects of ingredients used in consumer products. Compiled data are used to model and predict the chemical concen­trations in rivers, soil and air. Learn more about how we model these processes to predict the behavior of our ingredients. Exposure modeling allows the safety of a proposed product to be assessed in detail - at the local, national, and worldwide scale - prior to its launch. However, the ERA process does not end when a product is placed on the market; scientists worldwide continue to monitor the environment to confirm the outcome of the risk assessment. 

• Exposure Model 
• Environmental Risk Assessment

Municipal Waste - Packaging

P&G Beauty & Grooming is committed to the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle. Every year, as we learn more about how to use post-consumer recycled plastic resins, a decreasing proportion of our packages are dependent upon virgin plastics.  We are working with the recycling industry to encourage our consumer to recycle more of our packages each year. In some regions we have introduced reusable pump dispenser bottles that can be filled from packets made with a small fraction of the weight of plastic used in the dispenser. With complex computerized structural models we are learning how to reduce the amount of plastic in our shampoo bottles without sacrificing their strength and stability.

Strategically using LCA and other assessment techniques, P&G has systematically increased the amount of recyclable materials used in consumer products since 2006.

P&G Beauty & Grooming is significantly reducing the environmental impact of Gillette^® razor packaging through inno­vative package design, breakthrough printing technologies and an emphasis on transitioning toward more eco-friendly materials.

Scientists at P&G Beauty & Groom­ing are using new printing technologies to eliminate the Fusion^® razor plastic branding banners. This innovation is projected to reduce plastic use by more than 300 tons per year, the equiva­lent weight of 60 elephants.

After rigorous study, P&G Beauty & Grooming scientists decided to switch the Gillette Club packaging from a solid plastic case to a combination of cardboard and plastic. Their calculations found that the change will reduce plastic content by 65 percent per pack, or 1.1 million pounds per year. Through these and other modifications, P&G Beauty & Grooming scientists are work­ing to continuously improve the impact on the environment.