Sustainability And Value Creation
new product designs with reduced raw material usage
By Christoph Schmitz
Concepts 4 Success
www.c-4-s.com
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There are ways to develop, produce and market value-added hygienic products that support increasing awareness for the environment as well as changing consumer needs.
The absorbent product industry has delivered several major innovations over the last years, to the benefit of the end user of absorbent products, and the environment. Diaper and pant products are performing better despite being thinner than they were 20 years ago. The web materials used to make them have lower caliper today than they had years ago. So it is fair to ask the question: What do we need to change in the future? And what are the likely changes?
Each product generation on the market has its own life span, often described by a lifecycle curve that shows sales initially increasing andlater leading to a new product generation. This requires a major change—small improvement steps like making a product component slightly better or thinner—do not start a new product generation.
New product generations often come with significant benefits—mostly for the consumer, who ultimately decides whether or not the change is acceptable. Oftentimes, the new product generation provides a solution to a problem that the previous generation was unable to solve—sometimes one the consumer was not even aware of.
For disposable products, lifecycle curves could be drawn (e.g. for the rectangular products that were on the market in the 1970s) and were replaced by hourglass-shaped products. The latter ones had a much better fit, better leakage performance and were less bulky. The improvements were enough to convince consumers to switch to the new generation of products.
Another lifecycle curve can be shown for “fluff only” products, which were replaced by those that hold a core with a mix of fluff and superabsorbent polymer—like most products found on the market today. These have much better retention, significant benefits to the skin and higher capacity—just to name a few advantages that convince users to switch again because the product they used previously did not meet their expectations in these areas.
So, what benefits will the next generation of products bring? What are the problems for which current products do not provide a satisfying solution? And what is the “gold standard” of diaper and pant products that most of the parties engaged in this market would accept as a common goal to go against?
One statement frequently made in such discussions sounds like: “We need to provide underwear-like absorbent products.” However, the industry is far away from delivering anything that is close to underwear, although the target is pretty clear and obviously broadly accepted. In fact, there has not been any significant change toward this target in the last 20 years, as far as the overall design and construction of products is concerned.
If we want to deliver underwear-like products, what needs to change? How would “absorbent underwear” have to be constructed to deserve this name? And how would such changes impact the environment?
