Flower vs power

The household cleaning aisle may be a riot of industrial brawn and neon war paint but for a new breed of products, writes Catherine Dawes, clean now means green
Mr Muscle, loves the jobs you hate. While manufacturers may not have been able to create a man to climb out of the cleaning products and do the job for you, they are trying to make chores around the house more appealing.
There appear to be two different schools of thought on how to do this. Many of the major brands, such as Domestos, Flash and Cillit Bang, produce powerful products designed to get the job done quickly. This is reflected in the packaging, with chunky bottles, bristling with brute force and brand extensions such as disposable wipes aimed at cleaning convenience. However, taking a leaf out of the organic tree, a number of newer brands are introducing products that clean using natural ingredients. Bottles in neutral colours adorned with natural imagery are used to persuade customers that you can clean ugly stains with pretty products.
Sat firmly in the power camp is the Domestos range. White is widely used in the laundry market to signify clean, yet the household surfaces cleaning aisle is a riot of neon colours. Domestos decided that for really tough jobs like unblocking drains, black was needed to convey strength. London-based Design Bridge created the structural designs for a number of Domestos products.
Head of 3D structural branding and packaging at Design Bridge Nick Verebelyi explains that Domestos' Grot Buster and five-times-thicker bleach were designed to look like DIY power tools. "You can convey qualities such as fragrance through graphics, but to convince people that a bleach is thicker and more powerful you need to use structure." For the sink and plug hole unblocker, Design Bridge created a bottle with a neck that looks like a U-bend. "The U-bend in the bottle is a powerful call to arms – it says this is what I need for that job," he adds.
Flash has swift, rather than strong, as its cleaning message. "The name Flash says so much about what you want it to do. Flash suggests quick cleaning and a shiny kitchen at the end," says Bruce Duckworth, who heads up the UK side of design agency Turner Duckworth. However, as an established brand, consumers had stopped reading what the word meant and just saw it as a name. When the consultancy redesigned Flash wipes it wanted to get some of this meaning back into the name and inserted the words 'So durable it cleans more dirt in a…' above the logo.
The packs use vivid colours and light bursts to reinforce the image of a sparkling clean home. However, Duckworth acknowledges that this is a common tactic. "You walk down the cleaning aisle and every pack is trying to be blingier and shinier than the next. It's important that brands hold on to their own identities," he adds.
Two brands that have taken a very different approach are Natural House and Sainsbury's Cleanhome. Natural House managing director Carole Harvey says: "People are starting to be a lot more careful about what they use in their home. People are reading ingredient labels a lot more; especially people with allergies." Natural House makes organic, plant-derived cleaning products and lists all of the ingredients in each of its packs on their labels, rather than the minimum EU requirement to state surfactants. "We were very conscious that the packaging design should reflect the organic ingredients," says Harvey of the neutral colours and clear PET bottles used.
Parker Williams Design in London created the branding for Sainsbury's Cleanhome. Managing director Kate Bradford explains that while many environmental products appeal to a niche audience, Sainsbury's' eco offering needed to appeal to a broader market and fit within the retailer's wider brand. 'A kinder clean for your family' was chosen as the defining message – this is conveyed through the house made of grass, with just a subtle light burst above it. Cleanhome is the first UK own-brand cleaning range to be awarded the European Eco Label, which measures aspects of a product's environmental impact including its packaging.

Fresh approach

Method was founded in San Francisco in 2000 with the aim of making non-toxic cleaning products that look good. Louise Roper, Method UK chief ripple maker – that's head of marketing to you and me –explains that when people are investing so much in their homes and interior design, it seemed wrong that the cleaning product category lacked emotion.
Co-founder Eric Ryan wanted to create products that looked good enough to keep out on display. The Method packs combine pared down designs, stylish shapes and humorous copy in an attempt to take the bore out of household chores.
"Everything we do has to combine style and substance," explains Roper. "We're not about being an eco brand with a big leaf on the front." In January of this year, Method began a switch to 100% post-consumer rPET for its clear bottles. "With a couple of exceptions, everything that is manufactured in the UK is now 100% pcr. And we were the first cleaning product to make this move," says Roper. Method was also the first company in the US to use 100% rPET for custom-designed bottles.
However, there can be drawbacks with using recycled content for cleaning products, says Edward Butt, vice-president of sustainability at Reckitt Benckiser, which owns brands including Cillit Bang and Dettol. "There can be problems with getting sufficient quality and quantity of rPET. We do use recycled content in a number of bottles. But if the plastic is contaminated with, say, metal fragments it can react with products such as bleach."
The states of Oregon and California in the US require by law that manufacturers of non-food rigid plastic containers (with some exemptions) use a minimum of 25% recycled content across their ranges. Butt explains that as it is not feasible for global companies to produce different bottles just for individual states, Reckitt Benckiser has to maintain levels of recycled content across all the brands that are sold in these states. The law requires that if certain packs use none or less than 25% recycled content the difference must be made up in other products.

Gunning for green

Reckitt Benckiser uses trigger sprays manufactured by Guala Dispensing. "Recycled plastic is generally not a good enough grade for a trigger spray; you would get stress fractures and cracking," says Guala Dispensing area manager for UK, Ireland and Scandinavia Matt Lucas. Instead, the company has been working to improve the recyclability of its trigger sprays.
Guala's TS3 trigger spray uses less plastic than previous models and replaces the metal spring normally used with a plastic bellow. These changes are saving 266,000kg of metal and 38,000kg of plastic on Reckitt Benckiser cleaning products annually. It also means the trigger sprays are made from a single material and, therefore, easier to recycle.
The new trigger spray forms part of Reckitt Benckiser's Carbon 20 project, through which it is aiming to reduce its products' total carbon footprint by 20% per consumer unit by 2020, from a 2007 baseline. URS Corporation, a global environmental and engineering consultancy, has worked with Reckitt Benckiser to work out the total carbon footprint of each of its products. Around 28% of the carbon footprint of Reckitt Benckiser products is made up by packaging, while consumer use comprises 64%.
"Small changes across all of our consumers can make a big environmental impact," says Butt. "According to consumer research, most people flush the toilet before they start to clean it. This is unnecessary and dilutes the cleaner. If we can communicate to consumers, both on pack and externally, that the toilet cleaner will work better if they don't do this, that will be a massive water saving."
Concentrated formulations are advocated, particularly in the laundry sector, as another method of reducing water use, packaging and carbon emissions from transport. Although Cillit Bang already offers dilutable floor cleaners, Butt says there are no immediate plans to expand into other concentrates. "The risk rating of a concentrate goes up and consumers like convenience – concentrates aren't always considered to be as convenient. Also you would need to include more information about how to use the product on a smaller pack," he adds.
The US side of Turner Duckworth designed the packaging for a super-concentrated cleaning product called Shaklee. Consumers buy a bottle of 'Basic H', which would last a household at least a year, and with it get two or three empty bottles and stickers. They then make up dilutions of various strengths according to the intended use, for example floor cleaner or kitchen surface cleaner, and label the filled bottles with the stickers provided. It is also non-toxic.
David Turner, who is the US partner at Turner Duckworth, explains that Shaklee is not sold through normal retail channels. Instead, it is sold through network marketing – the Tupperware party model. "People don't read labels. If you were to sell it through retail a lot would use it straight out of the bottle. It is also a bit of a learning curve to get the concentrations right and would take a lot of space on-pack to explain," says Turner. Yet he doesn't see the Shaklee model being adopted by other cleaners. "It's a remarkable product, but people are just too lazy."

PET v HDPE

Household cleaning liquid bottles are increasingly moving from HDPE to PET. Many of the more eco brands, such as Method and Natural House, use clear PET bottles to tie in with their natural look. If the product can be seen through the bottle it also implies that the contents have nothing to hide.
Guala's Lucas adds that another advantage of a clear pack is that brands can use the same bottle across a range of products and fragrances – creating variation through a simple dye in the liquid. This is cheaper than using differently coloured bottles for each variant.