In late April, Unilever made headlines around the world when it announced major changes to its packaging sustainability objectives. While this move had its critics, who argued that it was evidence of the company valuing profits over environmental progress, its supporters argued that the decision represented a win for pragmatism. How does Unilever reflect on all of this, one month on? We spoke with Pablo Costa, Unilever’s Global Head of Packaging, to find out.
I think it would be useful to start with an overview of this news – how exactly have Unilever’s packaging goals evolved over the past few weeks, and what are some of the most important changes our readers should be aware of?
Our updated sustainability approach is all about being more focused in allocating our resources, more urgent in driving actions towards our long-term ambitions, and more systemic in our advocacy to address the enablers and blockers of process outside our direct control. We are now embedding and applying these principles to our work on plastic as one of our four sustainability priorities set out within our Growth Action Plan.
Our ambition is an end to plastic pollution through reduction, circulation, and collaboration. Our updated plastic goals bring more focus beyond 2025 on key issues - such as reducing our use of virgin plastic and developing alternatives for hard-to-recycle flexible plastic packaging, including plastic sachets.
Crucially, we have updated timelines and designed the goals in a way that will help us build on our progress in the short- to medium-term, while also being more realistic about the challenges. For example, our virgin plastic reduction goal now features a clear, interim goal - to reduce our virgin plastic footprint first by 30% in 2026 and then by 40% in 2028. This is to drive progress, improve transparency and strengthen accountability.
Simply put: why has Unilever decided to make these changes?
The changes we’ve made to our plastic goals are more of a natural evolution than a revolution. 2025 was never an end point and we are very much continuing the journey we already started.
Approaching our target date for delivery of our original goals was a good opportunity to reflect on our work to date. Looking back, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made to reduce plastic waste and increase the circularity of our packaging.
In 2017, we were the first major FMCG to sign up to the Global Commitment - an initiative by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme - and commit to making our plastic packaging 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable. Since then, we’ve increased our use of recycled plastic in our global plastic packaging portfolio to 22% and reduced our use of virgin plastic by 18%.
There has been a fair amount of backlash since this news was announced – including very public demonstrations at Unilever’s recent AGM. How would you respond to claims that these changes are a cost-cutting measure, as opposed to a pragmatic shift in focus?
Ending plastic pollution is one of the biggest, most complex challenges we face - so updating our plastic goals rightly comes with an increased level of scrutiny. However, we’re clear that we are doubling down rather than watering down our efforts.
For example, we have a world-class team of over 50 material scientists and packaging experts in our dedicated Packaging R&D Centre which we continue to invest in, prioritising initiatives that will reduce the amount of plastic we use.
The team collaborates with a broad network of partners from across the industry, start-ups and academia, developing novel material solutions and technologies to unlock new ways of packaging our products. We’re more determined than ever to use our innovation capabilities to find new, scalable solutions.
What kinds of changes can the packaging value chain make in order to facilitate brands like Unilever making more ambitious sustainability goals?
We absolutely need other actors in the plastics value chain to move in the same direction, whether that’s scaling alternative packaging materials or models. This is an important dependency for the delivery of our goals, which is why we’re stepping up our advocacy to help drive systemic, cross-industry change.
For example, we know that getting reuse-refill models to work economically at scale will require collaboration and buy-in across the value chain: retailers, manufacturers, delivery services, policymakers and civil society organisations.
We are now shifting our approach away from small-scale pilots and more towards industry-wide efforts, through our industry partnerships with the World Economic Forum, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the Consumer Goods Forum.
With the World Economic Forum’s Consumers Beyond Waste initiative, we are working to build a harmonised measurement and reporting framework for businesses to track progress towards reusable models of consumption.
This is important both for future strategy and well-drafted regulation. And through the Business Coalition for Global Plastics Treaty, we are also advocating for reuse provisions to get harmonised and globally coordinated national definitions, metrics and policies to incentivise reuse further.
Likewise, what interventions should national and federal governments be making in this regard? Might the recent PPWR and the impending UN-back global plastic pollution treaty make a difference here?
Definitely, we’re advocating with the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty for a shift towards global, harmonised rules because we know that voluntary industry initiatives alone will not solve the plastic pollution crisis. Moreover, we are facing a hugely fragmented policy environment.
A treaty can harmonise this landscape, helping to simplify our supply chains, scale existing solutions and spur further innovation. As well as asking governments to address downstream measures such as EPR and waste management, we believe discussions need to really focus on upstream measures - such as phasing out problematic and avoidable plastic products and harmonising design criteria for plastic packaging.
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