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25 years of safety and science

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SEAC, Unilever’s Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre in Colworth, UK and Bangalore, India, is marking 25 years since it was established in 1990.

Unilever sign in Mexico

Over the quarter-century, SEAC’s world-class scientists have worked with leading academics, government scientists, external organisations, and teams across Unilever to support safe and sustainable research and innovation across our brands.

Ensuring safe, sustainable products

Throughout that time, our 200-strong team has been committed to ensuring Unilever products are underpinned by the best science available – helping to win the trust of our consumers and government authorities around the world.

Julia Fentem, VP, SEAC, explains: “SEAC’s expertise is critical for ensuring that our products can be trusted by billions of consumers across the world as being safe for them, their families and their environment.

“We leverage our industry-leading capability to help shape new innovations that are safe and sustainable by design.”

1990

SEAC is formed, bringing together all Unilever’s safety resources and enabling the consumer, occupational and environmental safety of our products to be assessed in an integrated way.

1994

SEAC publishes its 100th research paper on non-animal approaches for assessing consumer safety. Since then, SEAC has published approximately 900 papers on new science, ranging from novel approaches for assessing the safety of potential allergens to exploring the environmental impacts of tea and margarine on water use.

2004

Stepped up Unilever’s investment in developing alternatives to animal testing initiating new research partnerships with leading scientists globally. Ten years later, a total ban on marketing products containing ingredients tested on animals was introduced across the EU and in some other countries.

2011

50 years since Unilever opened a state-of-the-art toxicology laboratory at Colworth. Since then, through SEAC Unilever has continued to evolve its industry-leading approach to assuring safety, ensuring our products are underpinned by the best safety and sustainability science.

2013

SEAC’s Safety Science in the 21st Century website goes live, sharing its research with scientists across the world and showcasing Unilever’s work in exploring the safe use of chemicals within consumer products.

2015

New scientific tools and knowledge have the potential to transform Unilever’s approaches to safety and environmental impact assessments over the next decade. We envisage that SEAC will continue to play an important role in developing safety and sustainability science and scientists for many years to come.

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