45 volunteers comprised of P&G employees, key digital influencers, and the media trooped together to the shores of Subic, Zambales last October 3 to clean up waste and spread awareness about recycling plastic wastes. Head and Shoulders partnered with The Plastic Solution Philippines to highlight the brand’s #HeadsTogether campaign.
The event hoped to foster a community who took collective action and worked together to help reduce plastic pollution. Alongside it, a sustainability workshop was conducted to educate the volunteers on segregation and waste recycling. The workshop also covered the creation of eco-bricks, which is one way to give new life to waste plastic.
The day’s activities were culminated with the advanced screening of “ACTIVATE: Ending Plastic Pollution,” a product of the partnership between Procter & Gamble, Global Citizen, and National Geographic to create a 6-part docuseries raising awareness for various global issues. Through the episode, attendees were exposed to plastic’s impact along marginal communities in the Philippines, and how Head & Shoulders is changing the game with its innovative beach plastic-bottles.
In France during the summer of 2017, Head & Shoulders’ launched limited-edition bottles made of recycled beach plastic. To do this, the brand partnered with recycling experts, SUEZ and TerraCycle. While TerraCycle led hundreds of volunteers in collecting and sorting plastic from European beaches, SUEZ took charge of cleaning these plastics and turning them into pellets. These pellets were then sent to P&G and turned into a part of its shampoo bottle packaging. In 2018, P&G haircare brands committed to using 2,600 metric tons of recycled plastic in order to make half a billion shampoo bottles. Just to give you a picture of how much plastic that is, it is also the equivalent in weight to 8 fully loaded 747 jumbo jets.
photo credit: The Times UK
The brand also shared Ambition 2030, which spans P&G’s brands, supply chain, society, and its employees and aims to enable and inspire positive impact on the environment and society while creating value for the company and consumers. Included in Ambition 2030 is a commitment that 100% of its leadership brands will enable and inspire responsible consumption; for the packaging to be 100% recyclable or reusable; and for the society to benefit so that no P&G packaging will find its way to the ocean.
With this, I hope that all other brands will take up this call to switch to responsible and sustainable production processes and make a visible effort to reduce their carbon footprint on earth. As for people like you and me, we can foster change by doing what we can wherever we may be. Mindfulness and commitment to lessen one’s environmental footprint is the start to practicing a sustainable lifestyle!
