Mumbai, May 2022: India’s fastest-growing 100% vegan beauty and personal care brand Plum is all set to roll out ‘Plum shelters’ under its initiative #Empties4Good – a first-of-its-kind initiative to help the voiceless. As summer temperatures soar, animals suffer from dehydration and exhaustion with no relief in sight. Our furry friends roaming the streets bear the brunt of the heatwave as they don’t have the luxury of a roof over their heads. This is what Plum Shelters aim to solve as the shelters made from empty plastic tubes and bottles will provide stray animals’ much-needed respite from the summer heat.

Plum runs a flagship program called “Empties4Good” wherein they make it easy and rewarding for customers to recycle their empties. Customers can send their cleaned, dried, empty plastic bottles and tubes in exchange for shopping credits. Once these empties are sent in, they are given away for free to a verified recycler while the customers are rewarded with shopping credits in their account on Plum’s website. The Plum Shelter campaign is an extension of this program wherein these collected empties will be used to design and fabricate dog shelters. With this initiative, the brand aims to put its empty plastic packaging to good use. What’s more, citizens can also participate in the movement by nominating their neighbourhoods and getting a shelter in their localities free of cost.

Commenting on this initiative, Shivani Behl, Chief Marketing Officer at Plum, said “We at Plum have always believed in being good – be it through our clean products, our science-backed toxin-free approach, or through our unique recycling initiative of #Empties4Good where we give away our recyclable plastic packaging to recyclers for free. This year, apart from the usual recycling activity, we thought of going one step further and creating ‘Plum Shelters’ for strays from these empties, which will help protect them from the sweltering heat. With citizens’ participation, we aim to reach far and wide across India. We hope that this will be a small but significant step towards spreading goodness”

More than 200 units of Plum Empties are bound together between mesh walls to create these shaded, cool, and well-ventilated shelters that are just the right size to fit in busy residential areas and housing societies. The mesh walls ensure that the animals don’t chew on the plastic bottles and hurt themselves. Not only do these shelters aim to give strays shade, but with the help of good Samaritans, even water and food! The best part – citizens across India can scan a QR code printed on the roof or visit https://plumgoodness.com/pages/plum-shelters to nominate their localities for a Plum shelter of their own. Such Plum shelters will then be handed over to the nominated neighborhoods free of cost.

As a pilot program, residential localities in Thane and Mumbai will see these shelters. The locations of these shelters will also be publicly listed on Google Maps so that dog lovers can find and visit them at their convenience. With the help of citizens, Plum hopes to make this a pan-India initiative that can bring about social good.