Unilever’s environmental audit and sustainable agriculture plans are a gamechanger for the way that global companies behave, says Jonathon Porritt.
For the last two years, Unilever has been carrying out a comprehensive ‘audit’ of the impact on the environment from the use of its products, in terms of water, waste and emissions of greenhouse gases. It already had all the data relating to the manufacture, processing and transport of its products, and has been making good progress in reducing all those direct impacts over the last 10 years or more. But those direct impacts turned out to be relatively insignificant when compared with what happens when customers actually use these products.
Having amassed the data, category by category, brand by brand, the Executive Team then set targets for reducing those impacts, unleashing an unprecedented search for innovative solutions across the entire company. Some of those innovations will require reformulating the product itself, or completely redesigning the packaging. Some will require a very different engagement with the customer, with a view to ‘co-creating’ the environmental benefit by using the product in a different way.
To be honest, I’ve never seen a process quite like this. The data-gathering has been rigorous (as is always the case in Unilever), and the targets are seriously ambitious. If it’s all delivered, then the net impact on the environment in 2020 will be no greater than it is today even though the company is simultaneously setting out to double its revenues during the same time period. Doubling revenues and halving impacts is going to be one hell of a challenge.
On top of that, Unilever has also announced that 100% of its agricultural raw materials will be ‘sustainably sourced’ by 2020. Since 1997, Unilever’s food brands have been developing a Sustainable Agriculture Code for all its suppliers, covering every aspect of production. It’s an extraordinary document, and makes most governments’ guidance on ‘good agricultural practice’ look extremely crude. Its work with the Rainforest Alliance on certifying its main tea brands, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil have been widely acknowledged as groundbreaking. But to put in place systems of certification and self-assurance covering every single ingredient in every single product is a vast undertaking.
It’s important to point out that it may be a little premature to get too excited about all this! It is, after all, just a Plan. Success can only be judged in terms of what is delivered, not in terms of what is being promised. There’s a long way to go before 2020 – and even if every target is achieved, in every country all around the world, environmentalists will still point out that the use of Unilever’s products is still having a huge impact on the natural world.
The lion’s share of that growth will be in developing and emerging countries where there are still billions of people for whom the benefits of good food, balanced diets, hygiene and sanitation are still not available. Some of Unilever’s growth will be achieved in meeting those basic needs, and some in terms of more aspirational consumer products that will be more problematic environmentally. But who is to say that the average citizen in India has less of a right to enjoy a Magnum ice cream than the average UK citizen?
Finally, for me personally, one of the greatest strengths of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, is the holistic vision that lies behind it – combining all the environmental metrics with nutrition and hygiene targets, community investment and educational projects, employee engagement and so on.
In this a game-changer for Unilever? Absolutely. Is it the best Plan out there for big global companies? I believe it is.
