Why P&G is asking you to change your habits to save the planet

 young girl named Louisa is a cosmic space traveler who has decided to make Earth her new home planet.
She takes the opportunity to point out some new rules that will require us to adjust our consumption habits to save her newly adopted residence. Use cold water. Use less water and electricity. Use recycled plastic and less packaging. “Resource conservation is vital,” she says, as Dad turns off the tap while shaving. “My beautiful planet will be respected, which may require some sacrifices.”

It’s all very sweet. Between the cute little girl and the soundtrack, which is remarkably similar the theme song from Elf, the ad is aiming straight for the heartstrings and your conscience. This is a pillar of Procter & Gamble’s (P&G’s) new corporate campaign, “It’s Our Home.”

P&G, the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company, spent more than $7 billion on advertising in 2020. It knows the value of a well-crafted message. With “It’s Our Home,” the corporation wants to convey how it is doing its part to make its products more sustainable, while asking consumers to do their part as well. But will consumers take advice from a company that has pumped so much waste into the world?

P&G’S SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS

P&G has made some major strides on the sustainability front. In 2018, the company announced it had already reached many of the 2020 sustainability goals it had set out in 2010, and then in 2020 announced it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 50%, reduced water use in manufacturing facilities by 27%, and eliminated the amount of manufacturing waste that ends up in a landfill at all of its manufacturing sites. It also announced that packaging for brands like Always, Ariel, Dawn, Fairy, Febreze, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Pampers, and Tide is 100% recyclable or reusable.

The key words there are recyclable or reusable, not recycled and reused. According to the Ocean Conservancy, on a single day in 2019, volunteers with that organization’s International Coastal Cleanup collected more than 214,000 non-beverage plastic bottles, nearly 117,000 personal-hygiene items, and more than 113,000 diapers around the world. Obviously these aren’t all P&G products, but there is a big difference between making something recyclable and reusable, and actually making sure it’s recycled and reused. According to a 2020 lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Earth Island against P&G and other major plastic producers, including Coca-Cola and Colgate-Palmolive, just 10% of plastic produced annually is recycled.

With the “It’s Our Home” campaign, P&G is hoping to persuade individual consumers to take responsibility for all that waste. “We’ve been embedding environmental sustainability into our business for decades now, and this is likely the first time we’ve gone out publicly about it at this level,” says Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard. “That’s because we need to make sure we’re doing our part first.”

Pritchard says that the company’s research reported that 72% of people want to do more to be sustainable at home, and about 90% of parents are inspired by their children to do so, but fewer than half actually make good environmental choices. Pritchard calls it the intention-to-action gap. “So we’re trying to close that gap because greenhouse gas emissions that come from the home are among the top three [causes],” says Pritchard. “And our products are in the home. So we feel it’s an obligation to make sure we can do our part in order to get carbon neutral for the decade, first in our operations but then also in our products and how they’re used.”

That has led to Tide ads featuring Ice T and Stone Cold Steve Austin “cold calling” people to convince them to do laundry in cold water, since more than two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions from laundry come from consumers using energy to heat water.