Our approach
Packaging is important: it protects our products, allows us to transport them safely, and ultimately saves far more energy than it consumes. At the same time it can end up as waste, particularly in countries where technology and infrastructure are not present to enable the recycling and recovery of the disposed packaging.
We define waste as any packaging which ends up in landfill, product left over in the packaging at the time of disposal and waste that results from our own manufacturing processes.
We take a holistic approach to sustainable packaging, which means looking at reducing all these different types of waste.
The targets we have set for our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan will require us to take the following steps to reduce our packaging and waste impact:
- reduce the quantity of packaging we require for our products. We will adopt leading-edge design techniques and choose materials to minimise impacts
- find more ways to enable our consumers to reuse product packaging, for example through the development of refill packs
- work on increasing the use of recycled and renewable materials in our packaging as well as making our products as recyclable as possible. This will require us to work with others through advocacy and partnership to strengthen the recycling and recovery infrastructure in countries where we sell products
- continue to reduce waste from our manufacturing process
- tackle sachet waste in developing and emerging markets
- eliminate particular materials of concern such as PVC.
While they are ambitious, we also recognise that these targets are a first step towards 100% sustainable packaging. We will continue to explore emerging technologies and ‘cradle-to-cradle’ approaches. This requires products to be designed so that resources are used in a cyclical way, meaning that materials can constantly flow round a ‘closed loop’ system, rather than being used once and then discarded. This remains an area for further development for us and the wider industry.
What is the purpose of packaging?
Packaging serves many purposes. It protects products, keeping them safe from contamination. It allows us to display vital information about how to use and dispose of goods safely – a legal requirement for some products – and to communicate product benefits in a way that is appealing to our consumers. Packaging also provides functionality benefits, for example making it easy to dispense a product or to reseal it after use to ensure that the product is protected over its entire shelf-life.
Packaging also offers convenience and portion control to match the needs of different consumers. In Europe, demographic changes such as more single-person households mean there is growing demand for smaller portions. In developing and emerging countries, many products across our foods and home and personal care portfolio such as margarines and shampoos are sold in single-use sachets to make them more accessible and affordable for consumers on low incomes.
Good packaging design leads to less product waste during transportation and helps consumers use products efficiently.
How can the impact of packaging be reduced?
Waste can have a highly visible impact on the environment. We share a responsibility with the consumer to prevent packaging from ending up as blight or a hazard.
Governments and campaigning organisations are increasingly alert to what they see as unnecessary packaging. This has led to commitments by some leading retailers to reduce the packaging of the products they sell and the materials used in transporting them. Consumers are also increasingly choosing products with less packaging.
Packaging improvements can bring immediate business benefits. The more we reduce our packaging, the greater the potential saving in costs for materials, energy, transport and disposal for us, our customers and our consumers.
The challenge we face is to continue to use packaging that is appealing and effective but to reduce significantly its environmental impacts.
To achieve our goals we rely on others. Where local recycling facilities exist, we depend on consumers to develop the habit of recycling packaging rather than disposing of it with other household waste.
Too often recycling facilities do not exist. Even if the technology does exist, local markets are generally not sufficiently developed to make collection and processing economically viable. These are among the many complex issues that we face in reducing the environmental impact of our packaging and achieving our Sustainable Living Plan targets. To tackle these, our focus will not only be on the improvements we make in our own packaging and design but on advocacy and partnership to solve some of the systemic problems we face as an industry.