Cutting your hair care carbon

Cradle-to-grave shampoo scrutiny shows it’s how you use it that counts

How do you shrink the carbon footprint of a bottle of shampoo? It takes more than putting ‘Botanics’ on the bottle, as Boots is discovering.

Boots, Marks & Spencer and Cadbury Schweppes have just joined a new scheme to get companies to cut carbon emissions throughout the entire life cycle of their products. The scheme is backed by the Carbon Trust, whose chief executive Tom Delay says this is the “next critical stage in the business contribution to tackle climate change”. The first pilot studies, done with crisp makers Walkers and the Trinity Mirror media group, found ways of cutting CO2 emissions by 28,000 tonnes a year, while taking £2.7 million off their energy bills. One key tip for Walkers was to give farmers an incentive to supply potatoes with lower moisture content. Buying only by weight had meant a double whammy of energy wastage, as suppliers kept the storage sheds artificially humid, and the spuds then needed to be fried for longer to drive off the moisture.

For its own initial project, Boots chose two shampoos from its Botanics range and submitted them to cradle-to-grave examination over three months - mapping out the carbon emitted at every stage, from the sourcing of raw materials to the way customers use and dispose of them. The result? Though the data is still being evaluated, Boots’ sustainable development manager Andrew Jenkins can already see that “the greatest carbon footprint is in the consumer-use phase - by a large margin”. In other words, there’s much more CO2 being emitted during those long, hot showers, and through empty bottles being binned, than in producing the stuff and getting it to the shop in the first place.

What can the retailer do about that? Put something on the label advising people to turn the shower down a few degrees? That’s one option under consideration, says Jenkins, but Boots isn’t about to tell people to take cold showers or wash less frequently. “We don’t want to be too hair-shirt about it.”

Emphasis on the end-user doesn’t mean Boots is washing its own hands - or hair - of responsibility. It is planning to increase the proportion of recycled plastics in its bottles, and working to remove packaging from every stage of distribution. Advice to consumers on package disposal is also being considered, although this is more difficult, given the number of different recycling schemes across the country. - Terry Slavin

Andrew Jenkins, andrew.jenkins@boots-plc.com,

11 January 2007

Terry Slavin