Committee on Climate Change

Gavin Neath is the Senior Vice President for Sustainability at Unilever. He is responsible for the company's sustainability targets and initiatives across the world. Gavin joined Unilever in 1977. Over the years he has worked in the UK, France, Belgium and South Africa. From 1998-2004 he was Chairman of Unilever Foods UK, followed by Chairman of Unilever UK until 2006. He was also President of the Food and Drink Federation and a Member of the Development Board of the Royal Court Theatre. In 2007 he was awarded the CBE for services to the UK food industry.

Unilever came top of the new FTSE CDP Carbon Strategy 350 Index, launched in June 2010, with an overall score of 76.7%. The new index is based on a carbon management scorecard measuring companies across eight main areas: policy and targets, measurement, assessment, decision-making, emissions performance, disclosure, supply chain and product. Also in 2010, Unilever was included in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) Leadership Index for the sixth consecutive year. The index recognises the top 10% of companies in the FTSE 350 based on the level and quality of their climate change disclosure.

1. What is the current GHG emissions footprint at Unilever?
Our Greenhouse Gas Footprint is currently 26% raw materials, 3% manufacture,  2% transport, 68% consumer use and 1% waste. Unilever has been working to reduce its carbon footprint for many years. We started by focusing on the direct impacts of our factories, laboratories and distribution networks. More recently we have widened our scope to embrace the full length of our  value chain covering everything from the sourcing of raw materials  through to consumer use and disposal of our products.

Our foot printing work shows that sourcing of agricultural and chemical raw materials can amount to around ten times as much green house gas emissions as our own direct emissions. Consumer use and disposal of products may reach between 30 and 60 times as much as our own emissions, depending on the assumptions made about how consumers use our products.


2. What is Unilever doing to reduce its carbon footprint?
Unilever has ambitious plans to grow its business creating jobs and income for all whose livelihoods are linked to our success – employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and thousands of farmers around the world. But we recognise that growth at any cost is not viable. We want to be a sustainable business in every sense of the word. So we have developed a plan – the “Unilever Sustainable Living Plan” – that will enable billions of people to increase their quality of life – without increasing their environmental impact.

The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan will result in three significant outcomes by 2020:

• Help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being
• Halve the environmental impact of our products
• Source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably

 
3. What changes are you making to products to ensure they are more sustainably and ethically sourced?
Our commitment to halve the environmental footprint of the making and use of our products by 2020 goes further than our manufacturing operations. It covers the full value chain from sourcing through to consumer use and disposal. Examples of how we’re working across the full supply chain are as follows:

Sourcing – We are on track to source all tea for Lipton tea bags from Rainforest AllianceTM Certified estates by 2015. We have helped 38,000 farmers achieve certification, boosting their incomes and providing good working conditions for over 175,000 tea growers. During this time Lipton has grown by 5-10% in key countries

Manufacture – Our 264 manufacturing sites have, since 1995, reduced 43% in CO2, 65% in water use, and 70% in total waste on an absolute basis. 16% of the energy used in our factories comes from renewable sources, e.g. biomass in China, solar in Viet Nam and combined heat and power in several EU factories.

Retail – We have re-engineered 450,000 of our ice cream freezer cabinets to use non HFC climate-friendly (hydrocarbon) refrigerants.  We will purchase a further 850,000 climate-friendly freezer cabinets by 2015.

Consumer Use – The Cleaner Planet Plan programme across our laundry brands combines new innovations such as  compacted laundry liquids and powders with consumer communication and education on the benefits of washing with reduced water and at lower temperatures.

Disposal – We are integrating sustainability into our packaging design.  The latest Suave shampoo bottle saved the equivalent of more than 100 million plastic bottles over four years. The upside down deo roll-on for Rexona, Sure, Axe/Lynx and Dove uses 18% less plastic than its predecessor. We are also promoting recycling and lobbying to increase recovery rates. In the UK we are encouraging local authorities to collect empty aerosols;  in Brazil, in partnership with retailer Pao de Acucar, we have set up over100 recycling stations and in Asia we are trialing pyrolysis to turn sachet waste into fuel. We are running trials to use the fuel generated from the sachet waste in one of our Indian factories.
 

4. What sort of initiatives are you running that aim to change consumers behaviour around climate change?
One in 3 households worldwide uses a Unilever laundry product – a total of 125 billion washes a year.  Our small & mighty concentrated liquid detergents reduce GHGs by 10-50% per dose. Compacted powders reduce GHGs by 5-20% per dose. If all our consumers used concentrated variants we would save 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to 1 million cars off the road.

5. How do you think that climate change might affect food security/ availability in future?
Over half the raw materials we buy come from agriculture and forestry. Security of supply is a core business issue. Already changing climate and rainfall patterns are having an impact on our sourcing of crops like tea and tomatoes.

Our commitment to 100% Sustainable sourcing helps us manage these risks. It also presents an opportunity for growth. Our customers and consumers are increasingly demanding food that’s fair for farmers, fair for the planet and fair for future generations. Sustainable sourcing allows our brands to stand out in the marketplace.