P&G Greatly Expands Eco-Box Portfolio
TerraCycle Include USA
With more consumers than ever purchasing their household essentials online, Procter & Gamble is expanding its Eco-Box portfolio to include more of its Fabric Care brands.
Now available in this award-winning packaging format are Tide Original, Downy, Gain, Tide purclean, Tide Free & Gentle, and Dreft. Go here for more information on this innovative package, which was a Diamond Award Finalist in Dow’s 2019 Packaging Innovation Awards.
The Eco-Box format remains primarily an e-commerce play, and Eco-Box products arrive on the consumer’s doorstep as a sealed, shipping-safe, corrugated box—with no wasteful outer boxing or padding needed. In other words, it’s a perfect execution of what the Amazons of the world are clamoring for: SIOC (Ships in Own Container). Inside is a sealed bag of ultra-concentrated liquid laundry detergent or fabric conditioner that can accommodate about 100 loads of laundry with 30% more cleaning per drop. It also includes a No-DripTM tap. According to Cincinnati-based P&G, this packaging format requires up to 60 percent less plastic than traditional packaging.
“This is one of those things that started small for us,” says Todd Cline, P&G Section Head, Global Fabric Care R&D. “The idea was to create the optimal product and package for e-commerce, something that ships in its own container with no additional packaging needed and that protects a liquid product from the standpoint of leak resistance. But it also had to delight the consumer using it. And in the time that Tide Original has been in this format, we’ve seen really great response from consumers, 80% of whom indicate they would rather use this than traditional bottles.”
P&G remains guarded in identifying suppliers of packaging materials or machines that have made the concept come alive. But one bit of new news is that, according to Cline, “we now have a system set up with TerraCycle to permit recycling of the inner bladder and the dispensing tap.”