Procter & Gamble Named Winner of Prestigious UN Award

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): The leading shampoo brand ‘Head & Shoulders’ by Procter & Gamble has been selected as winner of ‘Momentum for Change’ award by the United Nations in the Planetary Health category. A total of 19 activities that contributed most to the fight to combat climate change were awarded.

P&G was honored in recognition of efforts by a partnership between Procter & Gamble, TerraCycle and SUEZ that designed an innovative action plan to manufacture shampoo bottles from recycled beach plastic. The plan aims to deliver improve health for marine and human life by way of removal of degrading plastics from waterways and beaches.

Lisa Jennings, VP Head & Shoulders and Sustainability Hair Care, Procter & Gamble stated that the company is humbled to receive this award along with its partners. The award provides encouragement to expand the pilot and continue with more innovations in circular economy solutions. She expressed the hope that the project will continue to inspire other brands and industries to come up with more innovative solutions to fight plastic waste.

Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change congratulated this year’s award winners. The award winning projects could likely act as agents of change to catalyze communities and countries to go further in environmental protection. The goals have to be raised over the years and decades to come, Espinosa said.

According to the UN Climate Change Secretariat, the fully recyclable shampoo bottles made from 100% recycled plastic and recycled ocean plastics are the first of its kind in the world. The efforts by the company have been successful in bringing about the largest solution to ocean plastic in terms of volume and the percentage used in the package.

P&G had announced the ambitious initiative at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland during January this year. The company had made it clear that hundreds of non-governmental organizations and thousands of volunteers will be engaged to collect discarded plastic waste from beaches, which in turn will be recycled to produce new bottles.

The company noted that this is the first step in its road to a more sustainable future for plastic and packaging in the hair care industry. The plastics collected by volunteers are transported to TerraCycle facility where they are sorted, cleaned and sent to be grinded into pellets. These pellets are used by P&G to make new bottles. P&G targets to use 25% recycled plastic across all bottles in Europe by 2018. The company is estimated to be using approximately 2,600 metric tons of recycled plastic every year towards manufacturing containers for its hair care products.