Procter & Gamble (P&G) is the number-one household and personal products company in the world, with annual sales of roughly $22 billion, operating in 180 countries. It is #11 on Forbes' list of largest U.S. companies and #29 globally. Among its iconic consumer brands are Tide, Pampers, Crest, Duracell, Oral B and Gillette.
In 2007, P&G set a goal of selling $50 billion in sustainable products by 2012, 11 percent of its projected revenues. This sustainability initiative has three primary focus areas: product innovation, largely within existing brands; operations; and supply chain and stakeholder relations.
In April 2010, P&G launched 'Future Friendly' in the U.S. 'Future Friendly' is a multi-brand and multi-platform effort to encourage consumers to reduce the environmental impact of their daily lives.
GreenBiz.com's Heather King talked with Len Sauers, P&G's Vice President of Global Sustainability about the company's 9,000-member innovation team, the company's impact on Dow and Dupont, and what it takes for CEO Bob McDonald and team to get consumers to wash their clothes in cold water.
Consumer research indicates consumers are brand loyal and unwilling to make price or performance tradeoffs to capture environmental benefits. Yet, P&G increasingly encounters upstart green brands like Method and Seventh Generation. And, major retailers like Walmart have introduced sustainability mandates to suppliers like P&G. Given these factors, are consumers, competitors or retailers the more significant force behind P&G's environmental sustainability effort?
Within the past couple of years, we've noticed increased consumer interest in sustainability. The majority of the market -- 70-80 percent -- is now eco-aware. That means they want to do the right thing but they're not willing to accept tradeoffs. We have chosen to target this "sustainable mainstream."
The key is to develop products that enable this mainstream market to be sustainable without any inherent tradeoffs. There can be no decrease in performance or increase in price. With this approach, we view sustainability as an opportunity to drive top-line growth and cut costs.
Are there certain brands or market sectors that offer greater opportunity for P&G to materially change the environmental impact of its products?
All of our brands have a potential to be more sustainable. Some offer easier, faster wins. P&G is a science-based organization. We use life-cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental impact of a product or operation. The assessment showed that initially we could make the greatest improvements in our laundry and homecare lines: Ariel, Tide, and Pampers. Ultimately, to sell $50 billion in sustainable innovation products by 2012, all P&G products must get greener in their formulation and packaging.
So, P&G is reinventing all of its brand name products to deliver sustainability without asking consumers to adopt new brands or accept tradeoffs. Is this reinvention a challenge for the company?
We see sustainability as an opportunity more than a constraint. P&G has an R&D team of 9,000. They are actively developing new technologies to be sure our brands or new products deliver consumers the same benefits -- more sustainably. Innovation is central to our sustainability effort and our company growth.
Green ideas for business on Facebook
My company, Bulbstorm, recently hosted a $1,000 green idea challenge on Facebook. We received hundreds of ideas from simple tips for living to actual business ideas. The relevance? Our founder is a P&G alum! If P&G is looking for green ideas, we'd love to help them leverage the power of their Facebook fans to find them. :)
Animal testing and "green'??
How is a company "green" when it has a dreadful history of cruel testing on animals?
Sustainability & Social Responsibility
As a sustainability consulting understanding the negative impact that the P&G's chemical-ridden products/packaging have on our environment and the negative impact on its customers is small in comparison to the pain inflicted on the animal's they test on daily. Please make the commitment to stop animal testing first. In this day and age animal testing is barbaric and not necessary. Sustainability and social responsibilty are both very important to the welfare of our world. "Future Friendly" should include "animal friendly" much like Method and Seventh Generation.
Procter & Gamble: Still To Be Avoided
When one considers simply the toxic chemicals and plastics used daily by Procter & Gamble, then adds the processes involved in their manufacturing facilities, then adds the numerous code violation reports and neighbor and employee concerns, then adds the global scope of this enormous corporation, you begin to realize that directly and indirectly Procter & Gamble must surely be one of the biggest polluters on the planet.
Perhaps we should then applaud Procter & Gamble for addressing sustainability issues, even if they are doing so only due to growing consumer awareness of the company's non-sustainable current status. Before we applaud them though we should re-examine how Procter & Gamble define sustainability. From the article above: "we view sustainability as an opportunity to drive top-line growth and cut costs." To Procter & Gamble then, sustainability is an economic model rather than an environmental one.
How nice that Procter & Gamble are helping educate people that cold water cleans just as well as hot. There's some electricity saved. Then the consumer can pick up the Procter & Gamble plastic bottle, pour toxic, non-biodegradable Procter & Gamble laundry soap into the cold water, and poison their water supply when the washing machine empties. But - they did save some electricity, so big win for sustainability as defined by Procter & Gamble.
Maybe we'll see some of their chemicals being marketed in new and improved plastic bottles made of 50% post-consumer recycled plastic. Big win for sustainability! And that Procter & Gamble plastic bottle will still require one hundred generations to decompose in a landfill.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on Procter & Gamble. After all, change comes hard to a corporation this size. Procter & Gamble is so large that it has lost the ability to be nimble; I'm sure a polluter of this scale has so many layers of bureaucracy that any true innovation is stripped away from most new products developed by the time they have passed through all the levels of approval needed. It's rather sad to hear that Procter & Gamble's Global Sustainability Division has 9,000 employees and their focus is on the economic benefit of changing consumer awareness, not on the environmental, health, and economic benefits changing their own products and processes.
On Grist Mr. Sauers posted the following in April, 2009: "At P&G, we made a commitment several years ago to integrate sustainability into every part of our business. All new facilities are built from a sustainability blueprint, ensuring that we are maximizing the natural environment and minimizing our footprint. We're designing production lines that recycle once-escaping energy. We're re-engineering packages on many of our 300 brands to reduce packaging without any discernable change to design or to the user's experience. We've also reformulated some of our products, delivering compact laundry formulas that come in smaller bottles or deliver superior cleaning in cold water." That's right: he's been saying the same thing for at least a year. So what have the 9,000 employees of Procter & Gamble's Global Sustainability Division been doing for the past fourteen months?
They've probably been focusing on "driv[ing] top-line growth and cut[ting] costs." It appears that Procter & Gamble does indeed define sustainability simply in terms of sustaining their own economic viability. They get bonuses, consumers get the shaft. Procter & Gamble should be headquartered on Wall Street, not somewhere in Ohio.