Zero Waste Haircare

For over 180 years, P&G has built brands that people trust and love, enabled by a culture of innovation and superiority across all elements of the consumer value proposition. Increasingly consumers and other stakeholders expect brands to meet performance and value expectations while also helping solve some of the most complex challenges facing our world. We expect this, too.

In 2018, we released new sustainability goals called Ambition 2030 (https://us.pg.com/environmental-sustainability/). Ambition 2030 aims to enable and inspire positive impact on the environment and society while creating value for the Company and consumers. Solving the biggest challenges we face will require collaboration, which is why we are focused on creating partnerships that will enable people, the planet, and our business to thrive.

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With this Design Think Tank brief, our aim is to gather creative ideas around the concept of Zero Waste HairCare Solutions within an urban environment. Zero Waste is a set of principles focused on waste prevention that encourages the redesign of resource life cycles, eliminating the occurrence of waste. The goal is for no trash to be sent to landfills, incinerators or the ocean and the northstar is to be able to reduce existing waste from other industries. Such solutions would offer a zero-waste alternate to haircare products and the formulation could evolve around liquid, cream, gel, solids, powder and others.

Relevant solution domains may include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Business & Service models – reduce, reuse, repair, re-manufacturing, recycling.
2. Material selection – renewably sourced materials, post-consumer recycled plastics, recyclable &/or biodegradable materials, sustained upcycled by-products materials, carbon-positive materials.
3. Product and packaging Design – designed-to-last products, design for easy end-of-life sorting, separation or reuse of products and materials, designed to degrade on its own kind of products, designed for a zero-waste manufacturing process.

ZERO WASTE WITH WELL-DESIGNED BEAUTY STANDARD: Additionally, as we focus packaging efforts to move to a Zero Waste solution, it is imperative to also recognize that the solution should deliver a delightful consumer experience that maintains the high bars of beauty standards (for example appealing looks & feel, feeling premium, provoke emotional excitement to try etc) within the HairCare category. Key design consideration is to ensure focus areas will deliver on these requirement, as alternative solutions may require different materials, packaging reduction, different decoration/ appearance and different usage experiences.

DELIVERABLES - We would love to hear your ideas and supporting technologies, business and service models that you believe can deliver the actionable solutions to the highlighted challenges listed above. If there is a good fit, we would partner to drive agile in-market pilots to learn together. All ideas and submissions will be reviewed completely. We'd particularly welcome submissions from multiple parties working across the value chain, since we believe these may be more able to deliver 'circular' solutions that address the breadth and complexity of this problem.

For specific enquiries on the problem statement: please contact: [email protected]