FLORIAN WEIGHARDT
Household and Personal Care Today
florian@teknoscienze.com

Abstract

The Copenhagen Household Care Sustainability Summit, organized by the Danish company Novozymes, celebrated in December 2011 its second edition. The first summit was organized two years prior, with designs on taking advantage of the positive hopes created by the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP15 / MOP 5 environment, which was held in Copenhagen one week later. COP15 turned out to be de facto a fiasco. On the contrary, the Household Care Sustainability Summit was a success: major players of the world of detergency came together discuss the future of sustainability in the industry. Experts from companies normally in competition were sitting together, exchanging experiences and developing new ideas and approaches. HPC Today was present too and published full coverage of the 2009 Summit in its first issue of 2010.

INTRODUCTION

Sustainability is economically sustainable
Besides being of high ethical importance, sustainability is definitively sustainable and brings great economical advantages to industries, distributers and retailers. As clearly stated during the first summit, companies who were quick to make sustainable choices were able to make their investment pay out in a short time. Cost savings for overall energy and water consumption, personnel management, logistics and transports are hard evidence today. Moreover, the environmental benefits of sustainability and the reduction of pollution have advantageous consequences in terms of taxation and regulatory fulfilments. Sustainability is therefore not always a difficult choice for companies to make.
This was the prominent take-home message in 2009 at the first Copenhagen Sustainability Summit.

Challenges to sustainability
The first summit identified consumer behaviour as the most important challenge of the whole sustainability process in household care.
At first glance, this may seem strange. However, consumers represent that pa ...