Our approach
This section summarises Unilever’s sustainability objectives and activities, explaining why this area has become such a focus for the business.
Our approach
Unilever’s approach to sustainability prioritises business benefits as well as ethical principles. More than ever, the business is seeing clear evidence that sustainability can drive growth. Whether it’s by stimulating the innovation pipeline, providing customers with sustainability expertise, or winning the hearts of principled consumers, sustainability is helping us win.
As you scroll through the following pages, you’ll learn how the business is helping improve hygiene and well-being, promote sustainable agriculture and fight climate change.
Sustainability & Our Brands
Every day around 160 million people in 150 countries will buy a Unilever brand. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the social and environmental impacts that we have on the world around us, come largely from our brands. We are increasingly embedding sustainability thinking into the day-to-day-activities of our brand management and R&D teams. We do this through a simple planning tool called Brand Imprint which helps us to consider the social, economic and environmental impacts that our brands have in the countries where they are sold. This has resulted in important commitments and inspired new ideas for addressing social and environmental issues.
The experience we gained through the Brand Imprint process helped us develop the next stage of our approach, the Vitality Framework. This framework defines our mission across our brands and business by ‘delivering more personal vitality, more social value and less environmental impact.’
Sustainability & our stakeholders
Sustainability affects the entire community of stakeholders that surrounds Unilever. Unilever actively collaborates with customers on sustainability, encourages suppliers to meet the highest-possible standards, looks after the well-being of employees and helps local communities thrive.
Of course, we can’t promote high standards more widely unless we exemplify impeccable governance ourselves. As described in our "About Us" section, our Code of Business Principles requires us to act with total transparency, openness and integrity around the world, staying out of politics and upholding human rights. Click on the link at right to learn more.
For proof that we’re moving in the right direction, you only have to look at the different kinds of external recognition we receive.
For instance, Unilever is the only company to have been named food industry category leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Indexes for eleven years in a row. Sustainable Asset Management has named us a Sector Leader, while also awarding us with a Gold Class distinction. We’ve been included in the FTSE4Good Index, and have achieved a score of 88% in the latest Carbon Disclosure Project survey.
If you want to explore sustainability at Unilever in more depth, our full Sustainable Development Report is available on
www.unilever.com/sustainability
where you can also download our shorter Sustainable Development Overview.
