Our five point plastics plan in the UK and Ireland

Closing the loop

Unilever has been serving the UK for well over a century, using our brands to help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. You can find our brands in 9 out of every 10 UK homes. So, when it comes to disposing of our products, we have a huge responsibility to ensure once they’ve been used, that they are successfully recycled whenever possible. It’s not only the right thing to do, but we know it’s important to our consumers.

Globally, Unilever has committed to:

• Ensuring that all of our plastic and packaging is fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025
• Using more recycled content
• Halving our use of virgin plastic
• Collecting and processing more plastic than we sell

Our commitment to halve our use of virgin plastic, makes Unilever the first major global consumer goods company to commit to an absolute plastics reduction across its portfolio.

In the UK, we want to significantly accelerate this. To do this and to drive progress in tackling plastic waste, we’ve created our five-point plastic plan, ‘#GetPlasticWise'.

#GetPlasticWise

We face our own unique and complex challenges when it comes to the UK’s plastic economy and waste management processes. We believe that to truly tackle plastics waste in the UK it must be a collaborative effort across the full value chain – right from the supplier and manufacturer, through to the consumer and waste management companies. That’s why we’re a founding signatory of the UK Plastics Pact.

Our new #GetPlasticWise campaign is a holistic approach to rethinking plastic. Through focusing our efforts in five key areas, we’re working towards a closed loop where plastic stays within our plastic economy, not in the environment.

1. Increase the amount of recycled content we use and the recyclability of our packaging
2. Reduce the amount of plastic in our products and business, and ensure that the plastic we do need can be reused, recycled or composted
3. Seek alternatives to plastic
4. Support positive behaviour change with our consumers and employees
5. Work collaboratively with a range of partners to affect change

We’re looking for ways to innovate across all our brands and developing solutions that allow us to use less, better or no plastics.

We’re investing in research to develop industry leading packaging, finding ways to deliver the same high-quality products and experience to our consumers whilst eliminating un-necessary plastics.

Through collaboration with industry partners, we’re developing new technologies and solutions to the plastic challenge that cover the full life cycle of plastic. By truly closing the loop with cross-industry solutions, we can fully utilise plastic as a useful and re-usable resource, rather than one that ends up as waste.

We’re committed to rethinking how we communicate and help consumers to do the right thing, supporting a better understanding of the complex plastic landscape so successful recycling becomes commonplace.