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- The Wire
The High Environmental Costs of Unilever's Shampoo Sachets and Other Plastic Packaging in India
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories The High Environmental Costs of Unilever's Shampoo Sachets and Other Plastic Packaging in India Saabira Chaudhuri 36 minutes ago Sachets – as with so many other convenience-led products – had spiralled well beyond what its corporate parents had originally imagined. Illustration via Canva. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now The following is an excerpt from Saabira Chaudhuri's Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic published by Harper Collins. In 2001, the Lucknow Times published an explosive article quoting a cow shelter owner who said 100 cows a day were dying from eating plastic bags in Lucknow alone. 'The affected animal will have a skeletal body but abnormally bloated stomach. It will very eagerly wobble to the trough but would only sniff at the fodder, unable to eat anything,' wrote the reporter. 'They gradually become weak due to starvation and then finally become immobile.' Saabira Chaudhuri's Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic Harper Collins (2025) By now the sight of cows munching on dumped plastic was far from unusual. The early 1990s post-liberalisation boom in consumer goods had translated into a sea of plastic waste. Over a few years, India was deluged by bags, bottles, cutlery, cups, diapers, sanitary pads and, of course, sachets. India, like other parts of Asia, was also taking huge volumes of allegedly recyclable waste from the US and other developed countries. The plastic bottles that could be extracted for recycling were removed. Much of what remained was dumped or burned. Between 1990 and 1993, India imported 19 million kilograms of plastic waste, all of which the exporting countries smugly logged as having been 'recycled'. By now the vast majority of Unilever's shampoo sales in India were made in sachets. The tiny plastic packages were widely littered. 'This stuff, it began to show up in landfills and nature with our brands on it and that was ghastly,' says Nihal Kaviratne, Unilever's Indonesia chairman in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 'We were embarrassed because it could be traced right back to us.' The cows' plight got people talking. For the first time, consumer goods executives began to worry about a broad crackdown on plastic waste that could include sachets. 'Knowing the importance of the cow in Indian culture, we knew this could at some stage become a hot potato for us to handle,' says M.K. Sharma, who worked as vice chairman and general counsel of Hindustan Lever at the time. Sharma and Shiv Shivakumar, Hindustan Lever's shampoo marketing head, flew to Singapore to meet regional Unilever executives to discuss ways to cut down on sachet waste. They considered incentivising consumers to bring empty sachets back to stores but quickly abandoned the idea given the mess and hassle shopkeepers would incur in keeping millions of old sticky sachets in their small stores. 'The cost was not commensurate with the benefits we would derive,' remembers Sharma. Plus, it was unlikely many consumers, even if incentivised, would bring sachets back. 'People washed their hair in ponds, wells or running streams and for someone to bring back a 2-inch by 1-inch sachet was seen as a virtually impossible task,' he says. Years earlier, Unilever had tried to sell products unpackaged, asking shopkeepers to dole out small quantities of margarine and laundry detergent from larger barrels into shoppers' reusable containers. The effort was short-lived. Kaviratne, who worked as Hindustan Lever's marketing manager for personal care in the early 1970s, says eliminating the packaging commodified Unilever's products and erased its most valuable assets: its brands. Also read: 'If Only the Government Worked as Hard as Waste Pickers' Despite India's poor waste collection infrastructure, recycling rates for items like plastic bottles and newspapers were high. Thanks to the country's army of waste pickers, items that had any resale value were quickly snapped up. The shampoo sachets had none. They were too small and complex to recycle, so waste pickers ignored them. Sharma suggested that Unilever, over time, move to paper sachets which, even if littered, would break down. But tests Unilever did on paper revealed major flaws. For one thing, paper didn't hold up against India's high temperatures and humidity. For another, the colourful, high-lustre sachets strung up at storefronts acted as advertisements for Unilever's brands. By contrast, paper sachets were dull, hard to print on and 25 per cent more expensive. By 2004, sachets accounted for 90 per cent of shampoo sales in rural India and 70 per cent of sales in cities. The tiny plastic packets had also metastasised well beyond shampoo, sparking what the industry's executives proudly called a 'sachet revolution'. Sachets were being used to sell deodorant, toothpaste, face cream, jam, pickle, perfume, ketchup, hair oil, hair dye, pain-relieving balm, hair removal cream, powdered drinks, butter, mosquito repellent, shaving lotion and digestive pills, among other products. Sachets – as with so many other convenience-led products – had spiralled well beyond what its corporate parents had originally imagined. Just as plastic trash bags were once intended to be used mainly by Canadian hospitals, and disposable diapers were dreamed up for weekends away at grandma's, the sachets were conceived of as a way to introduce low-income people to shampoo brands. The idea was that, as incomes climbed, consumers would naturally shift to using bottles. But similar to how trash bags were adopted by everyone and disposable diapers became everyday fixtures for children, the sachets were embraced by Indians of all income levels in both rural and urban areas. Many Unilever executives I interviewed acknowledge the environmental costs of sachets but justify these by weighing them against the perceived social benefit – that sachets make brands affordable to poor people. The flip side, of course, is that poor people are the ones most impacted by the negative externalities of plastic. Studies show that plastic production and disposal facilities – including dumpsites – are invariably located near low-income communities. At the time, few were talking about microplastics, but we know now that littered sachets break down into tiny plastic particles that spread widely through ecosystems and end up in both animal and human bodies. It's also worth remembering that the demand Unilever and other consumer goods companies fulfil with their brands didn't develop organically. It was meticulously created through millions of dollars ploughed into advertisements designed to convince Indians to abandon their age-old reliance on homemade concoctions using reetha (soap berries) and amla (gooseberries) and opt for packaged shampoo instead. In the years that followed, Unilever made other attempts to find solutions to sachet waste across the globe. It encouraged consumers to bring their own containers to refill machines that dispensed detergent, and invested in a door-to-door electric tricycle in Chile that brought the machines to people's homes. The refill projects never scaled. The company ran a trial in Indonesia to recycle sachets through a solvent-based process that separates out polyethylene, the main plastic used to make the sachets. The trial showed that recycling the multilayer sachets was technically possible. But the costs of collecting the used sachets were far higher than any revenue derived from selling the recycled plastic, which made the operation economically unfeasible. 'We knew that sachets are the cheapest way to take products to the consumer, but also the most polluting way,' reflects Shivakumar. 'We started looking at solutions in 2001 and until now there is no answer.' Ultimately, after years of failing to find a solution, Unilever pivoted to publicising its efforts to collect bottles, milk pouches and other 'more viable' plastic waste. On a 2019 reporting trip in which I spent time with waste pickers and walked the streets of Bangalore with Unilever's India executives, I learned that the multilayer plastic Unilever was paying to have collected in order to meet regulatory requirements consisted mainly of larger packets for potato chips and biscuits rather than sachets. Much of what was collected was trucked long distances to be burned at cement kilns, a practice activists decry as dangerous and environmentally unsound. Unilever has since told me that it is no longer 'directly' sending plastic waste to cement kilns. It says it complies with India's regulations and that collected waste is managed in accordance with local guidelines. It didn't address my questions about how sachets specifically are collected or what happens to these. In 2021, nearly 41 billion shampoo packages were sold in India. Of these, 99 per cent were sachets. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Whose PET Is It Anyway? Another Round, No Results: India–US Carrier Talks Remain Stuck in Symbolism Organisation of Indian Origin People in the US Objects to Proposed Tax on Immigrants' Remittance Trump's Drive for Ocean Bed Mining Threatens Law of the Sea A Star Has Faded: Remembering the Astrophysicist Jayant Vishnu Narlikar US Targets Indian Travel Agents with Visa Bans as Part of Immigration Policy All Retired HC Judges Entitled to Equal Pension, Says Supreme Court Five Questions That Indian MPs May Have to Face Abroad Jaanne Bhi Do Yaaro | India's Data Blackout – From Census to Covid Deaths View in Desktop Mode About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
Scroll.in
20-05-2025
- Business
- Scroll.in
A new book examines how Unilever used single-use plastic sachets to boost sales
Consumer goods companies in the West had occasionally used sachets to entice consumers to try new shampoos and laundry detergents. But it was in emerging markets like India that companies realised the full potential of the plastic sachet. As a mainstream, everyday package, the sachet unlocked enormous multi-billion-dollar markets that had long been out of reach, promising a rush of new growth, courtesy of some of the world's poorest people, just as sales in developed markets started to slow. Indian shopkeepers had long found their own ways to make products like soap and laundry detergent affordable for the hundreds of millions of Indians – particularly in the country's villages – who couldn't afford a full bar or bag. They opened up 1kg bags of washing detergent powder and sold 100 grams at a time for 1 rupee, dispensed into people's own containers. They cut bars of soap into smaller pieces, selling these individually. By the late 1980s, Unilever's India subsidiary – Hindustan Lever – had begun packaging its shampoo brands Sunsilk and Clinic in sachets that held just enough for a single wash. 'There was a realisation in Unilever decades ago that people on daily wages also have the same aspiration as people on monthly wages,' says Vindi Banga, former chairman of Hindustan Lever. 'That is the genesis of the single-use pack.' Unilever had been selling its products in India since 1888, when crates prominently printed with the words 'Made in England' landed at Calcutta's harbour. The crates carried Sunlight soap. More products followed and, by 1931, Unilever had set up its first Indian subsidiary, making vanaspati, a low-cost substitute for ghee. Over the years, Hindustan Lever's in-house army of psychologists and market researchers had worked to more fully understand the motivations fuelling the Indian housewives who were its main customers. They visited the women's homes and brought groups of them together for tea, spending a long time getting them to relax so they'd talk freely. Among the valuable insights this time-consuming method of market research yielded was that the company's relatively pricey soaps were often bought by poor women. 'It is not necessarily the rich woman who buys Sunlight,' explained Hindustan Lever's chairman SH Turner at the company's annual shareholder meeting in 1958. 'It may be the poor woman who values its lather and the ease with which she can do her washing with it; the rich woman whose washing is done for her by servants often feels that they are so wasteful to [sic] soap anyway that it is best to buy for them the cheapest brand on the market.' Hindustan Lever's researchers also found that there was little knowledge of the company's brands, particularly in rural India. Farmers spent the most on food, tube wells, fertilisers, seeds and farming equipment. Weddings were a high priority too – these needed to be opulent in order to raise the family's standing. Next came consumer durables like bicycles, sewing machines and radios. At the very bottom were the kind of packaged goods Hindustan Lever sold, like soap and vanaspati. To convince Indians they needed products they had long done without – like liquid shampoo and powdered laundry detergent – Hindustan Lever deployed its multi-million-dollar marketing machine. 'All consumer goods manufacturers must spend a lot of money on advertising – particularly in India,' said Turner in his 1958 speech. Advertising, he explained, 'may often be required to introduce the product as one which is a necessary part of a higher standard of living'. Decades later, in 2014, Unilever's Southeast Asia head would once again describe the industry's approach to demand creation, outlining for investors how Unilever was creating a market for dishwashing soap. 'You can actually clean dishes with ash and salt. It works,' he said. 'But my task is to convince consumers that there is a better, more hygienic, faster, less residual solution. You need to convince consumers that their proxy is not good enough anymore.' To create new markets in rural India, Unilever employed a totally different model to the one it relied on in the West. Back in the 1960s, most Indian villages were 'media dark'. Hardly anyone had a TV and most people were illiterate. Hindustan Lever found ways to advertise to them anyway. It had a fleet of 12 vans that drove around villages showing Bollywood and local language films, either on TVs played from the backs of the vans or on roll-down screens. People happily sat through dozens of Hindustan Lever advertisements in exchange for the entertainment. Another seven vans drove around doing demonstrations: Hindustan Lever's marketers showed people how to use its soaps and detergents by physically washing clothes and half-clothed bodies in public. They performed skits and puppet shows. They travelled around the country painting advertisements for Unilever's brands on the walls of village compounds. Operating and maintaining the vans across enormous distances on bumpy rural roads was expensive. The cost of marketing to each viewer of Unilever's rural cinemas was 25 paise, a whopping 125 times higher than the 0.2 paise it cost to similarly reach an urban consumer. The efforts didn't justify the paltry sales of low-cost soaps and cooking oil they drummed up. But Unilever stayed the course. Its polling showed that once workers received regular pay, their interest in buying packaged food and soap rose. Unilever's executives saw the potential to turn millions of Indians into consumers by stirring what the company claimed were their nascent desires. The key to making money from low-priced (and hence inevitably low-margin) products was driving enormous sales volumes – selling billions upon billions of products. 'Economies come largely from mass production and mass selling of standardised lines,' Turner told Hindustan Lever's shareholders in his 1958 speech. 'We must have products which are acceptable alike to the rich and the poor.' The single-use multilayer plastic sachet, which Unilever would only successfully roll out some three decades later, enabled the kind of mass selling that Turner knew was needed to turn a fat profit in a poor country. Sachets would become Unilever's primary way to level the playing field in India, offering the same products to rich and poor. In time, they'd catch on widely, with thousands of different consumer goods brands opting to use the tiny plastic packs. 'In India, everything is sold single. You can buy one banana, one cigarette, one egg and – whether it's pickle, hair oil or salt – you can buy it in a sachet form,' says Anand Kripalu, who worked at Unilever for more than two decades before leaving in 2005 to become Cadbury's south Asia head. 'The best example of how sachets exploded a category is shampoo,' he adds. 'They put shampoo within reach of hundreds of millions of people overnight.'
