Environmental sustainability

Managing our environmental impacts

After more than a decade of action, we continue to make progress on managing the environmental impacts of our own operations.  In most areas, our impacts extend far beyond our own operations.

On the ‘upstream side,’ in our supply chain, we use our Business Partner Code to ensure that our suppliers meet our expectations on environmental and social impacts.  We estimate that over two-thirds of our raw materials come from agriculture, so our Sustainable Agriculture Program has a key role in managing our upstream impacts.

On the ‘downstream’ side – when consumers use our products – we work in partnership with various organizations and engage with consumers to achieve improvement in our wider environmental footprint, for example water use.  Our research and product development teams also aim to reduce the environmental impacts of our products during consumer use through reformulation and other innovations.

We focus on the following:

Sustainable agriculture

With over two-thirds of our raw materials coming from agriculture, we have a clear interest in how crops are grown and in securing future, sustainable supplies.

In 2008 we committed to purchase all our palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015. This marks another milestone in our decade-long efforts to source agricultural raw materials sustainably. 

Water

Unilever's brands rely on water at every stage of their lifecycle. Our aim is to reduce water use wherever possible and continue to improve the efficiency of our manufacturing.

Our impacts

In our food, home and personal care products, our use of water resources is both direct and indirect. Water is used by our suppliers of agricultural raw materials for the growing of crops, in our factories as part of the manufacturing process and finally by our consumers when they use our products through activities such as washing, laundry and cooking.

Understanding the impacts of this water use is central to our approach as water stress is already a significant factor in many of our markets. Consumer habits and government action are a crucial part of the solution yet we can make the most impact through the design and innovation of products which need less water to use.

Our water footprint

Our approach is to:

• reduce water use in our manufacturing operations

• work with suppliers, especially farmers, to reduce the amount of water used in crop irrigation

• design products which require less water during consumer use

Our new vitality metric aims to measure a product's water impact, taking into account the water we add to our products and consumer use. During 2007 and 2008 we piloted the metric with our home and personal care products, enabling us to identify opportunities for improvements across the product portfolio.

Packaging & waste

Packaging is essential for the protection and hygiene of our products.  Our goal is to reduce environmental impacts while retaining its overall effectiveness.  Packaging serves many purposes.  It protects products, keeping them clean and safe from contamination.  It allows us to display vital information about how to use and dispose of goods safely and to present our brands in attractive ways.

Yet concerns are growing about the environmental impacts of packaging.  Consumers, governments and campaigning organizations are increasingly alert to what they see as unnecessary waste. 

Unilever sells around 160 million products every day.  We use a wide range of materials, including paper, and board, plastic, glass, aluminum, steel and mixed material laminates.  Achieving truly sustainable packaging is a complex challenge but we are committed to reducing the environmental impacts of our packaging to the greatest extent possible.  Our approach is based on three elements:

Consideration of the whole product, not just packaging in isolation.

Assessment via our new vitality metric which covers the waste generated – taking into account all the different kinds of packaging and product requires.  It also takes into account an estimate of the recycling, reuse and recovery rates of the materials as used in a particular region.

And use of leading edge design techniques and choice of materials to minimize impacts. 

Underlying these three elements are five guiding principles that we seek to apply:  remove, reduce, reuse, renew and recycling.  Our Sustainable Packaging Steering Team implements this approach across Unilever. 

Climate change

Despite continuing reduction in our direct emissions, the scale of the climate change challenge demands urgent action across our whole value chain, including suppliers and consumers.  Extreme weather patterns and water scarcity will affect people everywhere with developing countries likely to be among the most vulnerable.  If climate change is not addressed, there will be serious consequences for our business operations, including threats to our agricultural supply chain and the availability of water in some of our markets. 

Our approach is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions - both our direct and indirect impacts.  We have committed to reduce CO2 from energy in our manufacturing operations by 25% by 2012 (using 2004 as a base year).

For our indirect impacts we seek to improve the footprint of our existing product portfolio by using our new vitality metric, assessing innovations using our greenhouse gas profiling tool and working with our customers and suppliers to address our wider impacts.  

Some of the actions we have taken to reduce CO2 emissions across our value chain include:

• Working with Greenpeace on climate-friendly refrigerants.  We are replacing over 2 million point-of-sale ice cream freezer cabinets worldwide with these HFC-free refrigeration units.

• Concentrated products, such as our laundry detergents, use fewer raw materials and less packaging, cost less to transport and are effective at lower wash temperatures.

• Ben & Jerry’s is raising awareness of the issue of Climate Change with its Lick Global Warming campaign and its ice cream flavour, Fossil Fuel.

• Choosing 100% green electricity for all of our manufacturing facilities and offices in Ontario with Bullfrog Power. Through the agreement, we green 59,000 MWh of electricity (enough energy to power more than 6,000 homes) annually, reducing our carbon dioxide emissions footprint by more than 7,500 tonnes every year. Our renewable energy commitment also plays an important role in advancing the development of new renewable power in Canada. Helping to create a cleaner world for today and tomorrow, Unilever Canada is the single largest commercial purchaser of renewable energy in Canada.