Case Study: A Vision for Unilever
In 2009, the multinational company Unilever adopted a new strategic vision that integrated societal and environmental responsibilities. The company's Sustainable Living Plan was the center of this strategy. This plan aims to help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing, decouple Unilever's growth from its environmental impact, increase its social impact, and enhance the livelihoods of all those involved in its supply chain. Read this chapter to discover how Unilever merged sustainability with profitable growth.
What steps did Unilever take to re-engineer the company and implement the Sustainable Living Plan successfully? How did sustainable innovation play a role in helping Unilever achieve its goals? What were the results?
Results
Unilever publishes an annual progress report on its Sustainable Living Plan (USLP). Its most recent report shows that the USLP has helped 601 million people to improve their health and wellbeing. It had cut CO2 from its energy by 47% per tonne of production in their operations and reduced waste disposal by 98 per cent per tonne of production since 2008. As for consumers, Unilever calculated waste disposal associated with its products was down by about 29 per cent since 2010. By the end of 2017 Unilever had enabled 1,259,000 women to "access initiatives designed to promote their safety, develop their skills or expand their opportunities".
In 2016, Unilever announced that it will be carbon positive by 2030. In 2017 Unilever announced a new target: to ensure that all its plastic packaging is fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025. And interestingly, Unilever's 22 Sustainable Living Brands (such as Lifebuoy, Dove, Hellmann's, and Lipton) are growing 70 per cent faster than other brands and account for 46 per cent of the company's total growth. Unilever reported a net profit of €5.4 billion for 2017. In the eight years to 2017 Unilever's total shareholder return had risen by 300 per cent, vindicating Paul Polman's strategy and appearing to support his belief that companies - big or small - can do well by doing good.