Unilever lets shoppers refill products into any plastic bottle

Unilever's home-care products are in the majority of Indian households, so the company's business and its plastic footprint grow together. But simply telling shoppers to refill for the environment fails, because most people do not care enough about sustainability to change a habit. The barrier was behavioural and commercial, not informational.

Smart Fill removed the barrier by removing Unilever's own brand asset. In-store, a shopper fills any of the company's product lines into any empty plastic container - a Vim bottle, or another brand's bottle - through a machine, in exchange for a discount. The brand traded its packaging, the thing it normally guards, to shift customers from pre-packed to refill, and to a more sustainable option that also costs less.

The machine lined its containers with a biodegradable material containing a small amount of active probiotic Bacillus thuringiensis, so that when the packaging is eventually discarded it kills mosquito larvae rather than just adding to waste. The whole design treated the customer's convenience as the lever and the sustainability as the by-product, rather than the other way around.