One way to see who leads the shampoo sachet market, and causes the most pollution, is to sift through plastic waste and see which brands are most common.

We worked with our NGO partner in India, CARPE, to do this for one entire ward in Aurangabad, Ward 7, which is predominantly a low-income demographic with about 12,000 people

It's not fun work. First, plastic material must be separated from the general household waste. Then sachets of all forms, which covers foodstuffs, candies, shampoos etc., need to be put to one side. These sachets are then segregated further into shampoos and then these are segregated once again into respective brands. It's slow and dirty work.

This is what it looks like…

And the winner is...

At the end of this process we categorised the brands.

The winner, with nearly 1/3 of the market, is Clinic Plus from Unilever. Next we have Vatika from the Indian multinational, Dabur. And in third place we have Dove, also from Unilever.

In fact, Unilever has several brands doing impressively well in the shampoo sachet market. Group them together, and Unilever has nearly 60% of the total, easily beating all other competitors.