As you read this, Unilever is pumping out 1,700 highly-polluting, throwaway plastic sachets – every single second. It’s single-use packaging like this that makes Unilever one of the biggest plastic polluters in the world.
We have a once-in-a-generation chance to solve the plastics crisis – world leaders are currently negotiating the UN Global Plastics Treaty, and Unilever is a really influential voice at the negotiating table.
What your company says, and does, could change everything. And as a Unilever employee, you have more influence than people outside ever could. If you believe in the company’s potential to be a force for good, this is your chance to make it a reality.
How you can help
1. Raise the issue
Please speak to management about the impact of Unilever’s plastic pollution, if you feel comfortable doing so. The easiest way to do this is to show them Greenpeace’s report, and ask them to pass your concerns up the chain.
If enough people speak out, we believe you’ll have the power to create this change from within.
2. Share information
If you have any information about Unilever or Dove that you think Greenpeace would be interested in knowing, for example about plastic packaging, or the UN Global Plastics Treaty, please share in the form below.
What Unilever can do
We’re not here to shame Unilever’s employees. We’re here to challenge a brand to live up to its proclaimed values. We’re here to empower those who have been let down and those who have been directly impacted by Dove’s plastic waste. What gives us hope is that people like you have the power to make a difference.
Greenpeace is asking Unilever to:
- Stop selling sachets now.
- Phase out single-use plastic and transition to reusable packaging within 10 years.
- Use its influence to advocate for these goals at the UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations.
Unilever’s plastic waste: the facts
A new report from Greenpeace provides in-depth analysis of Unilever’s role in the plastic pollution crisis – and its power to solve it. Here are the key facts.
- Despite committing to using ‘less plastic, better plastic or no plastic’, Unilever’s plastic footprint has not been decreasing at all.
- Unilever promised to cut its virgin plastic use in half by 2025. At its current trajectory, this won’t be achieved until at least 2034.
- Unilever claims to want a ‘waste-free’ world, yet just 0.2% of its plastic packaging is currently reusable and the company has to date refused to set a reuse target.
- If the company continues increasing its share of reusable packaging at its current rate, it will be the new millennium before it fully switches over to reuse.
- Unilever is the biggest corporate seller of plastic sachets in the world, and is predicted to sell over 53 billion sachets in 2023 – 1,700 per second. Campaigns around the world have called for these sachets to be banned due to their appalling environmental and health impacts, particularly in Global South communities.
- The company first promised to tackle the problem of sachet waste in 2010. Instead, it went on to produce an estimated 475 billion over the next decade, steadily increasing sachet production by approximately 1-2 billion items a year.
- Dove, Unilever’s most profitable ‘master’ brand, generates billions of units of single-use plastic each year, including an estimated 6.4 billion sachets, accounting for over 10% of Unilever’s total sachet sales.
- According to Unilever, ‘plastic sachets allow low-income consumers an opportunity to buy small amounts of products […] which they would otherwise not be able to afford’. But, prior to the introduction of sachets, customers typically collected these small amounts in reusable containers that they brought to the shops, generating far less waste.
- This system was replaced by sachets, which are almost impossible to recycle and have no economic value. Unilever’s ‘social’ justification for selling sachets rings hollow, given that by volume, sachets are more expensive than full-sized products.