Reduce, reuse, recycle

Our approach

Innovative packaging design can minimise the environmental impact of packaging itself. But it can also enhance a product’s lifecycle impacts. For example, effective packaging avoids product leakage or spoilage and consequent waste. Sometimes the best solutions are not the obvious ones, which is why we believe it is important to consider packaging options from a whole lifecycle perspective.

We have long been reducing the amount of packaging in our products through leading-edge design technology. In packaging design, we select the appropriate packaging materials to meet the functional requirements of the product. We then optimise the design in terms of sustainability. This process is applied at each stage of development, taking into consideration the needs of the consumer, product presentation and transportation.

We have also implemented a process to consider sustainable packaging earlier in the design phase of a product. Under this new process, packaging materials are benchmarked against other available options and must show improvements over time.

Targets & performance

Our perspective

We are making good progress to reduce our packaging. We have traditionally focused on reducing packaging material simply as a route to cutting costs. But our focus has changed. We are now focusing on developing innovation in lighter, stronger and better materials that have a lower environmental impact.

New technologies are critical to ensure we have a continuous programme for packaging reductions. For example, we have reduced the number of layers and the thickness of the sachet materials used for our hair products in South East Asia, and we will now roll this out across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Once the roll-out is complete, we will save around 2,500 tonnes of material.

It may take significant investment to reduce the weight of a material by just one gram through reducing its density or increasing its strength through new technologies – but that weight saving will be multiplied by the millions of times a product is sold.

Cutting packaging costs

Our brands typically update their packaging every few years and so our aim is to lightweight or improve the material choice each time a redesign is briefed.

The material we use to wrap our ice cream brands, Twister, Paddle Pop and Fruttare, is made of layers. Our R&D experts, working with academics and suppliers, have developed new materials which reduce both the number of layers and their thickness. The results speak for themselves. These brands have reduced their use of flow wrap from 19 specifications to just three worldwide. This change reduces the amount of packaging we use and has immediate business benefits. We started rolling out these materials in 2012. When our roll-out is complete, we anticipate a saving of around €1.3 million, complemented by a material reduction of around 530 tonnes.

During 2011, we launched a new bottle design in Indonesia and Thailand for our Citra skin care brand. This resulted in a weight reduction of 365 tonnes of material. In 2012, we introduced a new technology – bi-modal resin – and we saved a further 70 tonnes of material. The same technology is now being rolled out across many more of our skin care and hair care brands and will bring further savings in material and cost.

We introduced a new design for the Vaseline Petroleum Jelly jar, which has cut plastic by 3%, saving about 113 tonnes of resin a year. By moving to polypropylene, the pack is more recyclable. It also needs less energy to produce, saving 13,000 MW a year. At the same time there are clear benefits for the consumer – the packs are more visually appealing and easier to open.

We estimate that a combination of lightweighting, design and concentration improvements will help us find more than a third of the weight savings we are seeking in our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan target – along with eliminating unnecessary packaging altogether.

Targets & performance

We have made modest progress against our targets. This area is complex, as we anticipated. In some countries there is almost no infrastructure available to collect waste and some materials cannot readily be recycled as technologies do not yet exist. In other countries with more developed infrastructure, certain packaging formats, although manufactured from popular materials such as PET,  are still not collected and recycled in significant volumes.

We are using the knowledge gained from infrastructure studies and pilot initiatives to develop the most suitable solutions, whether this involves developing a new recycling waste stream or reviewing the materials used in our products.

Recycling and Recovery Index

We have developed a Recycling and Recovery Index (RRI) to track recycling and recovery rates. The Index enables us to calculate the percentage of packaging per format type that ends up in landfill and uses data from publicly available national indices. In countries where indices across some or all material types are not available, we make assumptions based on local knowledge.

For example, if plastic (HDPE) bottles in a certain country have a recycling rate of 50% and a recovery* rate of 25% and we use 100 tonnes of plastic for our bottles, we would calculate the recycling and recovery rate as follows:

* Recovery is where materials are reprocessed to obtain energy, ie incineration, anaerobic digestion or pyrolysis.

We have initiated a number of pilot projects from which we are hoping to select the most successful to be rolled out elsewhere. Many of our projects incentivise consumers to start recycling. While incentivising is not a sustainable long-term solution, it can help people take the first step towards making recycling a lifelong habit.

We are also pursuing projects that explore systemic solutions through improving local waste infrastructure, working with local government and waste services providers.

Recycling rates, practices and facilities differ around the world, as do the policies of municipalities and governments. In countries such as Brazil, waste can be seen as an opportunity for economic activity, with many informal but highly organised networks collecting waste for recycling. In mainland Europe, a significant amount of waste is incinerated, with systems to harness energy from the process.

Benefits of recycling

We continually pursue simplification in the number and combinations of materials we use to make our packaging with the objective of ensuring more packaging formats can be recycled/recovered. Habit change is slow but we are noticing more and more consumers are being drawn to the benefits of recycling – less litter, less waste sent to disposal, less use of virgin materials and potential savings in greenhouse gas emissions.

But achieving increases in recycling rates is not simple. It is technically possible to recycle or recover almost all packaging materials but to be viable, recycling must be economically attractive, and above all must happen within a workable infrastructure.

How are we encouraging more recycling?

The biggest challenge in recycling post-consumer waste is in retrieval  – getting used packaging from the consumer to recycling centres.

We are building our knowledge of recycling in several ways. In the US, our Dove and Suave brands are working with Recyclebank to incentivise consumers to recycle more bathroom products. Unilever Ventures has invested indirectly in Recyclebank as it will help us increase our understanding of how to encourage people to recycle more.

In Europe, we have commissioned studies in several countries aimed at understanding the recycling infrastructure for polypropylene (PP) pots, trays and tubs. These are widely used by our margarine brands, Wall’s ice creams and Vaseline jars. The studies have shown that this type of packaging is hardly recycled and, at best, is burnt for energy. We are currently engaged in discussions with players from each stage of the recycling process. We intend to pilot a project in 2013 focused on creating a viable business model which stimulates greater demand for PP pots, trays and tubs to be collected, sorted and recycled.

Our detailed analysis shows that national recycling rates for particular materials often lack clarity. For example, a 90% recycling rate for aluminium packaging may be based largely on recycling of aluminium drinks cans, and it is therefore inappropriate to apply the same rate when calculating waste to landfill for our aluminium aerosol packaging.

This analysis helps focus our efforts to increase recycling for specific packaging formats. For example we have increased aerosol deodorant recycling through strategic partnerships with industry associations and some of our customers in the UK, Brazil and Mexico, focused on infrastructure development and consumer education programmes. One obstacle to aerosol recycling is the myth that aerosols cannot be recycled.

Recycling deodorants

In 2012 we started to partner with the Earth 911, who specialise in providing consumers with accessible and actionable recycling information and Nextlife, a producer of polypropylene (PP) resins from plastic waste, to prove a business case for recycling PP deodorant sticks. The initiative incentivises school children to bring deo sticks to a central collection point, in exchange for financial rewards towards their school. There are currently 50 schools participating in the pilot programme.

In the UK, our deodorants business has entered into a joint initiative with the UK’s aluminium sector to boost the collection and recycling of aerosols by local government. The initiative seeks to educate consumers and stimulate recycling where the infrastructure is already well developed. It is being run in conjunction with the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation (Alupro), the British Aerosol Manufacturers’ Association (BAMA) and manufacturers of aluminium foil trays, which are also being collected. Our contribution to the UK aerosol industry has been recognised by an Environmental Sustainability Award from BAMA.

When we started the initiative in 2009, about 67% of local authorities accepted aerosols for recycling. At  the beginning of 2011, 41 authorities had signed up,  by September 2011 the number participating had risen to 82% and by the end of 2012 the figure was 93%.

During 2012 we joined the Metal Matters campaign to continue our focus on increasing recycling rates.

In Brazil, Unilever has set up 114 recycling stations with retailer Pão de Açúcar. All items collected are donated to around 30 co-operatives, which separate, bale and sell them, generating income for more than 1,000 people. Since 2001, more than 51,000 tonnes of materials have been collected and since 2007, around 850,000 litres of cooking oil have also been collected. In August 2010, we also started a deodorants pilot in partnership with the supermarket chain. The pilot was successful and has led to the permanent introduction of aerosol collection at Pão de Açúcar sites. To date we have collected more than 3,200 tonnes of aerosols through collection stations, with five co-operatives recycling aerosols. We plan to extend this.

Encouraging recycling behaviour

Although many consumers recycle kitchen waste, the bathroom tends to be forgotten. In 2011, we partnered with RecycleBank in the US to encourage consumers to recycle Dove and Suave shampoo bottles in return for money off coupons. An online module educated people about what they can recycle, what recycling symbols to look for and then rewarded them with points which could be redeemed for goods and services. The Dove module was viewed six million times. Unilever Ventures has invested indirectly in Recyclebank as it will help us increase our understanding of how to encourage people to recycle more.

In the UK, Unilever partnered with Torbay Council in 2011 to help promote its new kerbside recycling service for mixed plastics. Many of our products, including Flora, Wall’s ice cream, Persil and Knorr are packaged in mixed plastic packaging which is not yet widely recycled. As a result of the scheme, 60,000 households are able to recycle mixed plastics such as ice cream tubs – materials which would previously have been sent to landfill. This is the first time we have worked with a council on a mixed plastics recycling scheme and our actions have been recognised by UK waste charity WRAP (Waste and Resource Action Programme). We are awaiting the take-up results that will determine our next steps.

Increasing the use of recycled materials

We already use a significant amount of recycled material, particularly paper and board. We want to increase the amount we use, for example in our plastic packaging.

We believe that our demand for post-consumer recycled materials, as well as demand from other fast-moving consumer goods companies, will drive up volumes, thereby making a more attractive business case for re-processors and acting as a catalyst to increase the collection and reprocessing of materials.

High quality post consumer recycled material (PCR) is difficult to come by and can often be  sold at a premium price. In 2012 we used 3,126  tonnes of plastic PCR materials, up from 1,900 tonnes in 2011, in our packaging and continue to find opportunities to use even more. We are also working with re-processors to find opportunities to develop closed loop systems which would guarantee a continual supply of high quality PCR.

Our perspective

We are having some success in developing markets. We sell refill pouches in China and South Africa for some of our shampoo brands. In developed markets, this area remains challenging as consumers sometimes see refills as unappealing. However, we continue to experiment and are expanding our range. An example is Timotei shampoo’s 500 ml refill, launched in the UK in 2012. We are also working to ensure that the pouches we use for refills, which are already lighter than the solid packaging they replace, have the smallest possible environmental impact.

For example, the refill pouches for Sunlight dishwashing liquid in South Africa now weigh around 90% less than the original plastic bottle. In addition, we have halved the amount of unrecycled material used for refill pouches, saving 34 tonnes of plastic waste. This generated an annual cost saving of around €400,000 compared to the previous packaging format.

Our perspective

We committed to eliminate PVC from our packaging in 2009. Virtually all our packaging is now free of PVC. To get there our R&D teams around the world have developed and trialled new materials and our supply chain has invested in new equipment.

However, we have yet to eliminate PVC completely. Some of our foods use PVC in packaging for safety or hygiene reasons, for example as a sealant in metal food lids. For such uses, commercially viable technical solutions do not yet exist. We are seeking out new materials that provide the same functional properties as PVC at a viable cost.

Demand for such alternative materials is currently small, so we have been at the forefront of catalysing innovation in the marketplace. Once these new options become available, many industries will benefit from them.

Since we launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan in 201, we have made several acquisitions which have brought more PVC into our business. PVC from these acquisitions is not included in our 99% above. We are taking action to eliminate it.