Ten years ago, Unilever committed to making sustainable living commonplace through the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. This meant looking at the impact of our products across our value chain – including how they were designed, sourced and made.
In supply chain, our goal was to transform our manufacturing processes, from ensuring environmental care through compliance, measuring our impact on the planet and minimising overconsumption and inefficiencies in energy, water and waste.
This has enabled us to reduce our carbon footprint; to replace fossil fuels with green forms of energy; to find ways to source and reuse water; and to journey towards a waste-free world. In short, to build sustainability into our manufacturing DNA.
It has taken commitment, ingenuity and hard work by thousands of people across our manufacturing supply chain.
We’ve captured just a few of the stories highlighting the progress our factories have made in the past decade in a short film – from achieving 100% renewable energy use (and in some instances generating surplus power for the markets and communities we serve) to finding smart ways to harvest rainwater to create a more secure water supply for factory use.
And our ambition does not stop there. We continue to set bold targets. We want our operations to have zero emissions by 2030. We are working hard to protect water. Since 2010 we have reduced consumption by 47% and, as part of our new commitments, are implementing water stewardship programmes for local communities, intended to reach 100 locations by 2030.
As we transition from eco-efficiencies to absolute zero, we will be adopting more circular models. We will bring circular economy principles into the mainstream, with designs and implementations that reuse, recycle and recover material and maximise value from unavoidable waste operations.
“What amazes me is the global effort that has come together to deliver an astonishing change in the sustainability area,” says Head of Sustainable Manufacturing Helen Hudson.
“We’ve really mainstreamed the words sustainability and environment and put them as part of our priorities in terms of how we work in our factories. And now we are talking about how we do it more, and that’s brilliant,” she says.
The imagery used in this film was shot before the COVID19 pandemic.
Any subsequent work followed Unilever’s COVID19 safe guidelines.
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