Unilever plans to halve its use of plastic in beauty products by 2025
Unilever, owner of skincare brands Dermalogica and Murad, has announced its plans to halve its use of raw-material plastic in beauty products by 2025.
The company is planning to reduce its plastic usage by turning to recycled plastic as an alternative, amounting to more than 100,000 tonnes.
By the same year, Unilever also intends to collect and process more plastic packaging than it sells. This will be achieved through investment and partnerships in waste collection and processing, purchasing and using recycled plastic, and paying directly for collection of packaging through EPR.
Unilever’s announcement coincides with a wider initiative from the beauty industry aimed towards environmental change, including skincare brand Ren’s recent sponsoring of global clean-up effort Plastic Patrol for World Clean Up day.
“Our starting point has to be design, reducing the amount of plastic we use, and then making sure that what we do use increasingly comes from recycled sources. We are also committed to ensuring all our plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable,” said chief executive of Unilever Alan Jope.
“This demands a fundamental rethink in our approach to our packaging and products. It requires us to introduce new and innovative packaging materials and scale up new business models, like re-use and re-fill formats, at an unprecedented speed and intensity.”
Unilever are on track to complete their previously stated commitment of using 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging, and to use at least 25% recycled plastic in its packaging, by 2025 also.
