During the next six months, 12 families across the UK will take part in Unilever’s Sustain Ability Challenge. They will be monitored testing practical ways to adapt their daily routines in order to reduce their impact on the environment and cut their household bills.

Unilever will provide a series of tools, advice and inspiration to help the families achieve this goal and their progress will be independently measured by The Futures Company and published in 2013.

The FMCG giant says the challenge aims to break the myth that environmentally-friendly living costs more, and prove that sustainable living can in fact help families to save money, at a time when disposable incomes are under pressure.

Amanda Sourry, chairman of Unilever UK & Ireland said: “We know that nearly 70 % of our environmental impact occurs when consumers use our products at home so changing consumer behaviour is one of the biggest challenges we face in achieving our Sustainable Living Plan goals. We are committed to making sustainable living commonplace and in order to help our consumers live more sustainably and help their household budgets go further, we need to understand the triggers, barriers and motivators to inspire people to adopt new behaviours.

“We are excited to be working with families on this new challenge and gain insight that we can feed back into the business, so we can provide practical ways for consumers to make sustainable choices easy, rewarding and habitual.”

The move follows a previous research exercise in which a qualitative discussion was undertaken with 91 consumers on the “At Home with Unilever Community Panel” to explore attitudes and behaviours around making use of leftover food and recycling teabags.

Unilever says the online, moderated, interactive discussion format allows members to respond in their own time by adding their own answers to open questions and contributing to the views of others. The moderator will prompt and encourages additional response to a specific set of research objectives throughout.