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The Wire
4 days ago
- General
- 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? 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Telegraph
16-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Plastics are poisoning your body – and the effects are terrifying
The products are used for just a few seconds; their materials will last for hundreds of years. What does that mean for humankind? The journalist Saabira Chaudhuri answers this question in Consumed, the story of plastic packaging. The brief for her engaging book sounds narrow, but it touches on all manner of related topics, from the science of polymers to the sociology of marketing. Plastic was once seen as the environmental choice. In the 1860s, with the advent of snooker-balls and combs made of celluloid, who knows how many elephant and tortoise lives were saved? And since 20th-century plastic packaging was both lighter and stronger than paper – which is also, it's true, more polluting and resource-intensive than many of us realise – what wasn't to like? The assumption grew, incorrectly, that plastics were environmentally inert. As a result, the post-Second World War era saw wild enthusiasm for the use-and-discard lifestyle. In November 1963, Lloyd Stouffer, editor of Modern Plastics magazine, addressed hundreds at a conference in Chicago: 'The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.' They certainly didn't. McDonald's rolled out polystyrene clamshell containers across America in the 1970s, and, Chaudhuri relates, up to four billion of them were going to landfill every year. McDonald's claimed they would 'help aerate the soil'. The idea was self-serving, but not ridiculous: the prevailing assumption was that landfills worked as giant composters. But landfill waste doesn't decompose so much as become mummified. Plastic, over the decades, spread inexorably across the globe, into the oceans as well as on land. There was a backlash in the 1980s, but it petered out. A stronger instance began in 2015, and was led by, among other things, a viral YouTube video of a turtle found off the coast of Costa Rica with a plastic straw lodged in his nose. Other videos, more testimony and more anger followed. Plastic became inexorably linked in the public mind, across the globe, with destruction. This material, so casually thrown away, was killing the natural world. Rather than moving beyond disposability, however, manufacturers simply tried to make plastics recyclable (or at least compostable). The problem, as Chaudhuri explains, is that it's extremely difficult to recycle plastic; and commercial logic reduced much of that effort to little more than a giant marketing campaign for the supposedly virtuous companies using plastics – what she brands 'a get-out-of-jail-free card in a situation otherwise riddled with reputational risk'. Recycling wouldn't, in any event, address a more fundamental difficulty. Microplastics – plastic particles ranging from 0.001 to 5,000 micrometres across – first turned up in salt, honey, teabags and beer. In recent years, Chaudhuri explains, they have been detected in 'human blood, breast milk, placentas, lungs, testes and the brain'. You, dear reader, almost certainly have microplastics in your body. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine linked them to an increased risk of strokes and heart attacks. The humble plastic sachet – developed in India to serve a market underserved by refuse collectors and low on running water – provides Chaudhuri with what, to my mind, is her most striking chapter. You've probably used these single-use plastics yourself, maybe countless times: at takeaways, at restaurants, at bars. They have an astonishing range of uses, especially outside the West. 'In 2021,' Chaudhuri relates, 'nearly 41 billion shampoo packages were sold in India. Of these, 99 per cent were sachets.' They're so cheap that they undercut bulk purchases; so tiny that no recycler can make anything from gathering them; so smeared with product that no recycling process could handle them anyway. Beyond their tiny delivery of fluid, they have no redeeming qualities. Consumed is an engaging book, written in an efficient style and bolstered by a wide range of interviews. Chaudhuri, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, brings a critical but never censorious light to bear on the machinations of a wide cast: businesspeople, regulators, campaigners and occasional oddballs. For, at its heart, this is a story about plastic's pioneers and detractors, propelled to unexpected successes and stymied by unforeseen problems – and a corporate class who steeped the world in chemicals causing untold damage to us all.
