• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, September 27, 2010

Procter & Gamble has unveiled a new--and aggressive--sustainability strategy. The company is vowing to reduce packaging by 20%, replace 25% of petroleum-based products with sustainably sourced materials, and get consumers so inspired that cold water accounts for 70% of washing machine loads--all within 10 years.

"We are dedicated to reaching 5 billion consumers over the next five years," CEO Bob McDonald said in the company's webcast, "or 1 billion more than we reach today. It does us no good to grow our business today at the expense of tomorrow." Many of the Cincinnati-based company's goals, developed in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, cover manufacturing and production issues that are largely invisible to consumers, like truck transportation reduction, powering plants with renewable energy, such as solar and wind, and switching to plastics derived from sugar cane in some of its cosmetics packaging. Others involve initiatives that are likely to make consumers feel better about P&G brands. For instance, the company introduced its first-ever cause-related campaign for Pantene last week, called "Healthy hair for Healthy Water," which will help save an estimated 2,500 lives by providing half a billion liters of clean drinking water in the developing world. But those that require consumers to actually do something differently are much more complex. "It is going to be very difficult to get consumers to switch to cold water washing," Jacquelyn A. Ottman, author of The New Rules of Green Marketing, due out this fall, tells Marketing Daily. "We are obsessed with cleanliness, and P&G is the company that got us to believe we wanted laundry that was whiter than white, and that you need hot water to get things really clean."