The maker of Dove soap, Ben & Jerry's ice cream and Flora margarine has plans to ensure all its plastic packaging will be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.
Unilever plans to help create a plastics protocol to encourage similiar moves across the industry.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), an economic research group working with Unilever, says only 14 per cent of the world's plastic packaging is recycled, while 40 per cent ends up in landfill, and a third in fragile ecosystems.
Unilever has already promised to reduce the weight of the packaging it uses this decade by one third, and increase its use of recycled plastic content in its packaging to at least 25 per cent by 2025.
Unilever said it will use plastic for which there are ‘established, proven examples’ of the material being commercially viable for use by plastics reprocessors to recycle the material.
Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, said the company would address the challenge of ocean plastic waste bu working on “systemic solutions which stop plastics entering our waterways in the first place”.
“We also need to work in partnership with governments and other stakeholders to support the development and scaling up of collection and reprocessing infrastructure which is so critical in the transition towards a circular economy,” he said.
“Ultimately, we want all of the industry’s plastic packaging to be fully circular.”
Unilever has yet to outline full details as to how it will reach the recyclability goal, and it has stopped short of committing to a single plastic polymer type, which is was exploring in a bid to boost the recyclability of its plastic packaging.
