Products & consumers

Reducing water use where it matters most

As a consumer goods company, we invest heavily in R&D as well as conducting market research on consumer habits and how to motivate changes in behaviour. This enables us to develop new products that require less water in their use and to apply our insights to encourage consumers to change ingrained everyday habits. Small changes in the way people do their laundry or take a bath can dramatically reduce water use. Given the scale of our business, these small changes in behaviour, repeated many times over, can make a big impact on the environment.

Creating water-efficient products

An assessment of our products shows that our laundry, skin and hair products account for three-quarters of our water footprint. This is because of the large amount of water needed to wash clothes or take a bath. Using innovative technology, we are creating laundry products that require less water in use.

Water can have an impact on the affordability of our products. In developing and emerging countries, scarcity and shortages mean that water is often costly for consumers to purchase. By developing products that use less water, we can help consumers save money too.

Cleaner Planet Plan: Laundry products that save water

We have set new ambitious targets to reduce the water required in the laundry process by:

Our target 

• Making easier rinsing products more widely available.
• Providing 50 million households in water-scarce countries with detergents that deliver excellent cleaning but use less water by 2020.

For laundry products, more water is used in the rinsing phase than in the cleaning process.

To address this, we launched Comfort One Rinse fabric conditioner. Using this product means that consumers only need one bucket of water rather than three to rinse the detergent from their clothes. This saves an average of 30 litres of water per wash, and if used by all our laundry product users in Asia and South Africa could save 500 billion litres of water.

Consumer feedback confirms that the product often saves them money too. It also reduces the effort and time needed to do laundry in countries where washing by hand is common.

Another innovation is our Surf Excel Quick Wash in India. This aims to save two buckets of water per wash. In the dry southern states of India, where many people spend more money on the water needed for washing than they do on detergents, Surf Excel Quick Wash can make a big difference.

Based on assumptions about laundry habits, we estimate potential savings in the region of 14 billion litres of water a year from Quick Wash. Independent research by the C.P. Ramaswami Trust, an NGO that works on water conservation, has verified this claim.

Changing laundry habits

We are looking for new ways to use our consumer understanding and marketing expertise to encourage consumers to change everyday laundry habits.

This builds on work we have been doing for many years. For example we support an industry-led pan-European communications campaign called ‘Washright’ that uses on-pack advice, an internet site and TV advertising to give consumers information on how to get the laundry results they need with the least environmental impact. The guidelines were developed by the International Association for Soaps, Detergents and Maintenance Products (AISE).

For many years, as part of our membership of AISE, we have encouraged consumers in Europe to save water and energy by adopting more sustainable laundry habits – using the lowest possible temperature, doing a full load when machine washing and avoiding the pre-wash cycle.

We continue to promote the Save Energy and Water Campaign to promote sustainable machine dishwashing, by including usage advice on our labels.

Our laundry brands’ Cleaner Planet Plan is based on the use of efficient, innovative products and the promotion of better laundry habits.

During 2009 our Omo brand worked in partnership with WWF to run an education campaign in Turkey, a country where water consumption for laundry is 30% higher than the global average. The campaign encouraged consumers to do fuller loads in machine washing and avoid pre-washing. Since the launch of this campaign, pre-washing has declined from 44% of consumers in 2004 to 27% in 2010.

Understanding consumer behaviour is key to success. We use a variety of tools and techniques to enhance our knowledge, such as the use of electronic loggers which we are trialling in washing machines. The loggers help us assess the energy and water impacts of laundry by tracking how long the machine runs, how fast it spins and the temperature and amount of water used. This information will enable us to design more effective communication campaigns as well as plan product design.

See Climate change: Products & consumers for more on the Cleaner Planet Plan.

Skin cleansing & hair washing products

Given our target to reduce the amount of water associated with the use of our products, we need to find ways that allow consumers to continue to enjoy showers while reducing their impact on scarce water supplies. This is one of our greatest challenges.

Our skin cleansing products alone account for over one-third of Unilever’s total water footprint.

But the water actually contained in our products is less than 1% of the total, compared to the 99% generated from consumer use.

Our target 

• By 2015 we intend to reach 200 million consumers with products and tools that will help them to use less water while washing and showering. Our goal is to reach 400 million by 2020.

This challenge will be met through partnerships between ourselves and our consumers, and also with water authorities, retailers, and government agencies. We have set bold targets and are putting plans in place to achieve them. However, we recognise that we do not have all the solutions and we will need to work in partnership to help meet our goals.

To reduce the impact during consumer use of our products, we are continuously improving our products so that they demand less water for their use as well as promoting behaviour change. We will aim to persuade consumers of the benefits of reducing their own water footprint through simple measures such as turning off the shower while they lather their hair.

In the water-scarce US, we are launching a ‘Turn off the Tap campaign’, using our largest hair product brand in the country, Suave shampoo. The campaign communicates the environmental and financial benefits of lathering while the shower is off, and showing consumers how they could collectively save millions of litres of water every day. Through many small actions like these, our consumers can help make a big impact.

Water quality

Our commitment to water sustainability also extends to the quality of water once products have been used by consumers. This is reviewed by our Safety &　Environmental Assurance Centre in line with our policies on ingredients and materials in products.

In addition to this, our Pureit water purifier provides high-quality drinking water for our consumers in India. In our Sustainable Living Plan we have set ourselves an ambitious target to reach 500 million people with the Pureit in-home water purifier by 2020. We believe our technology has the potential to bring safe, affordable drinking water to millions more people in the developing world and will be making the achievement of this goal a high business priority. See Health & hygiene: Providing safe drinking water for more information.

We have also been working with the Royal Society of Chemistry and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa to investigate the possible uses of ‘greywater’ (water that has been used for washing dishes or laundry).

Greywater is a potential source of water and nutrients which could aid plant growth, but it also poses a challenge because of its salt content. The project is evaluating the suitability of greywater for growing vegetables in South Africa. Initial results are encouraging and show that laundry greywater does not inhibit plant growth.