Do you remember the goals set down by Unilever in 2010 relating to sustainability?
Well, several years into its Sustainable Living Plan, the company has announced its business is growing, more cost-efficient and resilient than before.
Unilever has said the most challenging of the goals has been in helping consumers to reduce their environmental impact.
“It is heavily dependent on wider market shifts,” said the company.
But Unilever has started to decouple its environmental footprint from its underlying sales growth.
The company has achieved a key sustainability target of sending zero non-hazardous waste to landfill, with its 240 factories in 67 countries eliminating their landfill waste.
This includes all three factories in Australia – at North Rocks, Minto and Tatura – where a range of policies and new waste solutions have been implemented to achieve this goal. For example, the Unilever team at Tatura has found alternative ways to safely recycle contaminated glasses, plastics and general waste – including everything from oily rags to old light globes.
More than 55 per cent of Unilever’s agricultural raw materials are now sustainably sourced, reducing the risk to supply – more than half way towards its 2020 target of 100 per cent. It is also making significant reductions in CO2 from energy and water in manufacturing, reducing them by 37 per cent and 32 per cent per tonne of production respectively since 2008.
In addition, its target to help improve the health and wellbeing of over 1 billion people by 2020 is 40 per cent there, with 800,000 smallholder farmers helped and trained since 2010, and 238,000 women given access to training, support and skills.
Unilever has also defined and measured its ‘sustainable living brands’ – that is, brands that contribute to one or more of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan goals and have a sustainable living purpose.
These brands – including Dove, Lifebuoy, Ben & Jerry’s and Comfort – are growing twice as fast as the others in Unilever’s stable.
Unilever has achieved a key sustainability target of sending zero non-hazardous waste to landfill, with its 240 factories in 67 countries eliminating their landfill waste.
