Environment
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Packaging plays a key role in delivering consumer health products to customers and consumers safely, ensuring a product’s effectiveness for its full shelf life. But globally, packaging waste, especially from plastic, poses significant challenges for the health of the environment.
We’re committed to making our packaging more sustainable. To do this, we’re working to minimise waste and associated pollution by moving to a more circular model, while reducing our dependency on non-renewable sources. But we can’t do it alone. We’re working with partners to drive global and local initiatives to improve the recyclability of consumer health product packaging.
Reduction of virgin petroleum-based plastic
We’re aiming to reduce the use of virgin materials from non-renewable feedstocks by using less plastic, increasing the use of alternative packaging materials, and using recycled and bio-based plastic in our packaging.
Recyclability of our packaging
We want the packaging materials we use to stay in-use for as long as possible. That’s why we’re designing and rolling out recycle-ready packaging formats across our portfolio. Making our packaging recycle-ready is a key milestone to achieving recyclability, whereby a format is effectively collected, sorted, recycled in practice and at scale in at least one region.
Case study: Recycle-ready toothpaste tubes
We are switching our toothpaste tubes from complex multi-material layer laminates with an aluminium barrier, to solutions designed around a single material. We partnered with Albea Group to use its Greenleaf laminate tube technology in our Sensodyne, parodontax and Aquafresh toothpaste tubes, which can be recycled wherever collection programmes exist. The move to recycle-ready tubes began with Sensodyne Pronamel tubes in Europe in 2021; we are currently rolling out recycle-ready tubes in all continents.
Partnering to drive progress
There are challenges associated with the collection and sorting of small format consumer health packaging. Waste infrastructure needs enhancing to ensure that the steps taken to develop recycle-ready formats lead to recyclability, in-practice and at scale.
That’s why we’re working with partners, such as The Sustainability Consortium and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as with the Holy Grail initiative, to pioneer and test new technologies to sort and reprocess small formats.
We are a member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Network, working with and learning from partners to help accelerate the development and scaling of the circular economy for consumer health product packaging.
Having joined the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, we also support global action to address the challenges associated with packaging waste.
Footnotes
1Versus our 2020 baseline.
2Where safety, quality and regulations permit.