Considering that P&G products are purchased 30 million times a day and used 3 billion times a day, it has a huge responsibility in ensuring they are sustainable.
Through research and innovation, P&G aims to develop packs that use a minimal amount of energy and raw materials, and are designed to be as ecologically friendly as possible.
P&G has to balance these considerations against the needs of consumers and society, of course. It's packaging has to be affordable and attractive, or nobody would buy the product - and its efforts would be wasted.
As a result, many of P&G's sustainable innovations are relatively simple ones that are easy to understand, such as promoting refill packs or using industry-backed labelling for recyclable products. (read more)
Elsewhere P&G has tried to make it easier for you to be more environmentally responsible through innovations such as user-friendly dosing devices, tablets or liquitabs which ensure you will always use the right amount of product in your wash.
These efforts are ongoing and over time have enabled P&G to greatly reduce the environmental impact of its packaging. By creating more compact products, for example, P&G has been able to cut down the size of its packages.
Similarly, P&G has developed sophisticated computer modelling and simulation programs to optimise the amount of material needed for its bottles and has made these available to external organisations.
And P&G has an outstanding track record in the way materials are recycled during the manufacturing process.
Finally, some of P&G's products reduce packaging purely because of their superior performance. Fairy lasts longer per bottle than any other washing up liquid on the market, so if everyone switched to Fairy, many fewer bottles would be bought and thrown away.
In fact, if everyone in the UK used Fairy, for example, the number of bottles transported and used would drop by about 30 million a year.
Fairy bottles are recyclable and during its history there has been a reduction of more than 10 per cent in the amount of plastic used in Fairy bottles across all sizes since 2000.
This commitment to sustainable packaging is part of P&G's wider Environmental Quality Policy.