Squeaky Green - Best Green Packaging Under £50K Case Study
Winner of the 2008 Green Award for the Best Green Packaging was Lush with their Squeaky Green - There's no greener packaging than no packaging campaign.
At Lush we have always believed that the most environmentally friendly form of packaging is no packaging at all.
At the creative level, Lush's inventors are on a mission to design products that require no packaging. Currently, over half of Lush's product range is sold to the customer totally naked--no plastic bottles, no cardboard boxes, no plastic wrapping. The percentage of unpackaged products on sale is always improving.
Lush's entry for the best packaging category aims to highlight this mission; our new Squeaky Green solid shampoo bar, sold to the consumer totally naked, was rolled out during the last twelve months and is a perfect example of the ways companies can eliminate packaging at the design stage of a product.
Where Lush does use packaging (for liquids, creams and gifts) we take pride in the fact that the total percentage in weight of recycled materials we buy is 90%. We have also become the first major cosmetics retailer to switch to 100% recycled plastic bottles. While we could have easily entered these recycled materials into the best packaging category, we thought that truly sustainable packaging design tries to eliminate packaging altogether, hence our bold entry to these awards for a product that is totally naked.
One of the guiding principles of Lush is to minimize the use of packaging and preservatives in our products, and our new Squeaky Green solid shampoo bar captures those ideals perfectly. The relevant part of the mission statement says, ‘We invent our own products and fragrances, we make them fresh by hand using little or no preservatives or packaging…’ (Lush’s full mission statement can be seen here: www.lush.co.uk/LushLife/WeBelieve.aspx).
The majority of liquid shampoos available on the market are mostly made up of water, surfactants and other chemicals, fragrance, preservatives and plastic bottle and a lid. The obvious reason why traditional shampoo needs to come bottled in plastic in because it is liquid! Lush asked itself—‘What if we took the water out and made it solid? Would we then be able to eliminate the plastic bottle?’ The answer Lush found was a resounding YES.
In October 2007, Lush launched Squeaky Green, a solid aromatherapy shampoo bar that requires no packaging: no bottles, no pots, no wraps, nothing. Making shampoos solid also have the knock on effect of requiring no preservative (if you remove the water, microorganisms have no place to breed).
We have been championing products with less packaging for a long time, but around Christmas 2007 we made a special effort to talk about our cause by creating leaflets to explain the benefits of choosing solid shampoo bars and had in-store promotions where customers that spent a certain amount on naked products received a shampoo bar for free.
To make a bar of squeaky green, we use a mixture of coconut-based solid surfactant (the cleansing agent) and a mixture of essential oils. You’ll find no water, no preservatives and no bottles. We cannot really say what types of packaging materials we are using, but we can say how much we're not using.
Because Squeaky Green contains no water, it is very concentrated. One can get between 80 and 100 hair washes out of one bar, thus making it the equivalent of 2-3 200ml liquid shampoo bottles. So, for every solid shampoo bar Lush sells, we're preventing about 75g of plastic from being introduced into the environment.
Results:
Squeaky Green is the latest addition to our solid range, and we sell around one million solid shampoo bars a year - last year we sold 990,000 to be precise. Because a bar lasts as long as three bottles of shampoo, we prevent approximately three million bottles from being produced, transported, sold, used and disposed of every year. If you consider that your average 200ml bottle with a lid weighs 25g, the bottles saved by the sale of solid shampoo add up to 75 tonnes of plastic not used. According to WRAP, a kg of virgin PET has the carbon impact of 3.4kg of CO2. Therefore, we also avoid 255 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of 500 return flights to Turkey.
But the positive effects do not stop there, a full bottle of liquid shampoo in weight and volume is around five times heavier and bulkier than our shampoo bar. When transporting liquid shampoo, one is basically moving water and plastic. To get the same number of hair washes you would need fifteen lorries to transport the equivalent in one lorry of shampoo bars.
In the shops, our sales staff are trained and able to explain all the environmental benefits of Squeaky Green to our customers, helping them choose a solid product over a liquid one.
Squeaky Green is a beautiful example of how clever design, creativity and sustainability can inspire a whole range that is completely different from what's traditionally available. It sends the message that the greenest of packaging design is to be able to design it out completely. We can't think of any other solution that is more powerful than that.
The Lush team said: If we win the Green Packaging category, we hope other companies will be inspired to look outside the box for creative design solutions for not only reducing packaging, but eliminating it all together.
They have won. Now it's your turn to convince the judges!
This category really had the judges debating hard. They especially liked the way the winner operates as a business, with drastic packaging reductions being an integral part of the offer.
