Unilever’s Love Beauty and Planet Reduces Carbon Footprint with Bag-in-Box
About Unilever
Unilever is a multifaceted consumer products company. According to their website, 2.5 billion people use products from one of their over 400 brands daily. Unilever has a detailed sustainability plan which includes initiatives to reduce product waste, promote gender equity, and source raw materials from smallholder producers and environmentally conscious purveyors. We teamed up with Unilever to work on their Love Beauty and Planet line, a brand of personal care products readily available at most grocery and convenience stores.
Partners for Success
Love Beauty and Planet makes sustainably-sourced beauty products, and wanted to invite their customers to take part in protecting the environment. As a brand under the Unilever umbrella, Love Beauty and Planet already implements a number of sustainability initiatives internally, but wanted to extend their reach further and actively engage their users, so we teamed up to develop a dispensing system where users could bring their shampoo and conditioner bottles to popular convenience and beauty stores and fill them up when empty.
Consumers refill their bottles from a 2 L bag-in-box system with a QuickSeal Sentry SafeLock, which are easy to use and can fill ten 200 mL bottles. Consumers were encouraged to actively participate in reducing waste by bringing in their old hair care product bottles, and were given a discount when they filled their bottles using this new dispensing system.
This dispensing system created a bridge between Love Beauty Planet and its customers. “Our project offered the possibility for the consumer to consume less plastic, linking the brand to sustainability,” a representative for Love Beauty and Planet shared. Customers wouldn’t just read about the brand’s commitment to sustainability, but could actively contribute.
Love Beauty and Planet made their environmental commitment to consumers clear—not only would its users get a discount for bringing their empty bottles to refilling stations, customers were encouraged to use any bottle, even if it was from a competing brand, to fill with whatever hair care product they needed.
Our collaboration with Love Beauty and Planet quickly garnered the attention of a variety of packaging organizations. The refilling system was listed as a 2021 WorldStar winner from the World Packaging Organisation, which celebrates the best packaging innovations across the globe. Scholle IPN and Love Beauty and Planet were jointly awarded the Grand Packaging Cases Award, given by EmbalagemMarca, which recognizes achievements in packaging solutions that improve the lives of Brazilian consumers. The judges award this prize based on the criteria such as material reduction, cost reduction, innovation, and adding value to the future of sustainable packaging.
Better for you. Better for the environment.
Any move to improve the sustainability of a product is important, but truly innovative solutions involve collaboration between multiple actors. Sustainability doesn’t start and end in a warehouse or a lab, but continues outward, and invites all participants in the global supply stream to do their part. Through our partnership with Love Beauty and Planet, we were able to help them:
- Build brand loyalty and create genuine connections with customers through a shared responsibility for the wellbeing of the environment
- Reduce greenhouse emissions, packaging weight, and material waste
- Provide financial savings for both the brand and consumers through lowered shipping weights and per-unit costs
- Fulfill Love Beauty and Planet’s commitment to sustainability in a way that is both measurable and long-lasting
Sustainability is a never-ending journey, and Love Beauty and Planet’s success demonstrates the power of simple solutions paired with active engagement to generate powerful results. We’re excited to talk to businesses who are serious about harnessing the potential of bag-in-box technology, whether it be in an industrial, institutional, and retail setting—let’s brainstorm something together!