Project Clean Up

UK decorative (deco) paint and accessories sales are worth £473M across both consumer and trade markets. At AkzoNobel our paint brand Dulux innovates across the entire decorating journey; one unexplored pain-point is the customers experience when cleaning up, and the amount of waste this creates - applicators, sandpaper, tape, etc - all of which mostly end-up in landfill or incineration. These downstream impacts makeup 58% of our waste footprint from decorating. We have not looked at the full gamut of opportunities in this area before and believe we have a responsibility to do so. This project will research how and why customers create waste when decorating, and the barriers to new waste reduction behaviours. We will then define innovation opportunities and develop new product-service concepts to test with potential customers. Our process will involve crucial internal stakeholders and we will sub-contract sustainable design specialists Reboot Innovation to lead this design-led work.The project will deliver an implementation plan aligned to our commercial planning process. The plan will contain a toolkit for AkzoNobel to replicate this approach to deco innovation, marrying waste & circular economy issues with human-centred design.