Case studies

Phosphate-free laundry tablets
Developments in laundry cleaning

We've launched phosphate-free laundry and dishwasher tablets. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs aims to reduce the level of phosphates in laundry products by 2015. Not only do the new tablets deliver significant environmental benefits, they also perform better than the old ones.

Reducing bottle weight

We reduced the weight of a washing up liquid bottle from 27 g to 22 g by stretching the wall of the bottle. This will gives us a total weight saving of 250 tonnes of PET Resin a year. We also reduced the cap weight from 3.5 g to 2.93 g by making the flip top narrower and redesigning the seal. This will give us a further saving of 28.5 tonnes of polymer a year.

Reducing our carbon footprint

We have reduced our carbon footprint by installing over 5,000 solar panels on the roof of our Ieper household factory in Belgium with the capability of producing 800,000 KWh of electricity per year. The installation covered over 44,000 sq meters of roof area and required 80,000 meters of cabling.

Since going live in January 2009, the 5000 panels have generated enough electricity to save the equivalent of 150 tonnes of CO².

We are now installing a further 2,700 panels on the roof of our Ieper personal care factory capable of generating a further 425,000 kWh per year or roughly 10% of the energy consumption of the personal care factory. When fully operational the combined benefit will be to reduce CO² emissions by over 550 tonnes per annum.