The move is part of the personal care brand’s new 2030 sustainability goals

Data shows American shoppers are buying more sustainable products.Love Beauty and Planet, Unilever BY PAUL HIEBERT As its name implies, personal care brand Love Beauty and Planet was designed with sustainability in mind. Today, the Unilever-owned company, which debuted in 2018, is announcing plans to continue its eco-friendly efforts with new pledges to become carbon-neutral and transition to 100% recyclable, refillable or compostable packaging across its product portfolio by 2030. To help fulfill the latter goal, Love Beauty and Planet began selling reusable aluminum shampoo and conditioner containers at Target earlier this year. The items come in two varieties: Coconut Water & Mimosa Flower and Murumuru Butter & Rose. By purchasing the brand’s recyclable 32-ounce bottles filled with product and pouring them into the aluminum containers, shoppers can reduce plastic waste by about 40% compared to buying Love Beauty and Planet’s standard 13.5-ounce bottles. Love Beauty and Planet

The rise of reuse

The move toward reusable containers is gaining momentum in the CPG industry. Ecommerce platform Grove Collaborative, which began selling goods in Target this month, offers its own line of cleaning products in a concentrated formula that customers pour into glass bottles and mix with water. Likewise, the startup Cleancult provides cleaning solution in milk cartons, along with glass soap dispensers and spray bottles. Last December, recycling company TerraCycle raised $25 million for its Loop initiative, a program that allows people to order household goods from nut butter to laundry detergent in durable containers and then send them back to be cleaned, refilled and reused. Love Beauty and Planet offers a few products through the Loop platform. More recently, Unilever invested $15 million in Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm focused on establishing circular supply chains, to help recycle around 60,000 metric tons of U.S. plastic packaging waste each year by 2025. “We believe plastics’ place is inside the circular economy where it is reused and not in the environment,” Fabian Garcia, president of Unilever North America, said in a statement.

Asking consumers to change

Getting shoppers to adapt to new routines, however, is another question. While 57% of U.S. adults show concern for the planet, only about one-third of these shoppers say they try to avoid using single-use disposable items, according to market research firm Mintel. “Even those who are considered environmentally-conscious face challenges to living a fully-sustainable lifestyle, which includes lack of knowledge, confusion created by marketing and lack of trust in brands,” Lisa Dubina, senior analyst of consumer culture and identity at Mintel, said in a statement. “Brands have the opportunity to step in and facilitate more sustainable action by offering simple and convenient solutions.” Sonika Malhotra, co-founder and global brand director at Love Beauty and Planet, noted that although transferring liquid from one bottle to another isn’t a common habit for most consumers of household staples, people are beginning to open up to it. “If anything, we need a million imperfect environmentalists [more] than a few perfect ones,” Malhotra said. Evidence suggests shoppers are moving in this general direction. Recent research from New York University’s Stern Center for Sustainable Business shows sales of household products labeled as sustainable stole almost another percentage point of market share from their conventional counterparts last year. Consumer goods with sustainable claims now account for 16.8% of all in-store purchases—a number that represents more than $131 billion.