Unilever goes circular

Unilever, the product marketing behemoth made new commitments to reduce its plastic waste and help create a circular economy for plastics. Unilever said that by 2025 it will halve its use of virgin plastic, by reducing its absolute use of plastic packaging by more than 100,000 tonnes and accelerating its use of recycled plastic, and help collect and process more plastic packaging than it sells.

The company observed stealthily:

We are moving away from using single-use plastic packaging – that is, plastic made to be used only once. We have adopted an internal framework which is shaping our thinking and future innovation: less plastic, better plastic, and no plastic.

Since 2010, our total waste footprint per consumer use has reduced by 31%†. We have successfully decoupled the amount of packaging we purchase from our business growth. However we want, and need, to go further in leading the way towards a circular economy for all our packaging materials – especially plastic.

In January 2017, we committed to ensuring that 100% of our plastic packaging will be designed to be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025. To help create an end market for this material, we also committed to increase the recycled plastic content in our packaging to at least 25% by 2025.

In October 2019, we announced two new goals to complement the 2017 commitment. These are, by 2025, to: 

Halve the amount of virgin plastic we use in our packaging

Help collect and process more plastic packaging than we sell