The Cleaner Planet Plan
The Cleaner Planet Plan will help consumers to reduce the environmental impact of doing their laundry.
Cleaner Planet Plan Background & Vision
The Cleaner Planet Plan, which is being led by Unilever’s laundry brands represents a very significant step in Unilever’s long-term sustainable development strategy. It is Unilever’s way of helping consumers to continue achieving outstanding laundry results with products that enable them to reduce the impact of laundry on the environment.
The Plan will help consumers to reduce the environmental impact of doing their laundry. Such is the case of the new compacted powders, concentrated liquids or the formulas in hand wash markets that allow reducing the water dedicated to rinsing. The vision behind Unilever’s Cleaner Planet Plan is to enable consumers to continue achieving outstanding laundry results with products that allow them to reduce the impact of their laundry in the environment.
The Cleaner Planet Plan
The Cleaner Planet Plan aims to tackle the environmental impact of laundry products in three ways:
1. By continuing to reduce the impact in the manufacturing process
2. By developing outstanding products that enable consumers to reduce their environmental impacts
3. By helping and motivating consumers to wash more efficiently so that they not only reduce their environmental impacts, but also save time, effort and money.
To date, Unilever Laundry’s new product development has resulted in the following environmental savings:
In its first two years since its launch in Europe Small and Mighty has saved 70 million litres of water (which is the equivalent of 450,000 bath tubs) 450 million plastic bags, 650 million A4 sheets through changes to the packaging and 4,550 lorries and 1750 tonnes CO₂through smaller and lighter packaging.
Since 1998, Unilever has been applying smart science to make its powders more concentrated whilst maintaining cleaning effectiveness. This has saved between 5%-20% of greenhouse gases and 10-20% of the packaging used each wash, depending on the products.
Unilever has led the drive to extend the concentrated fabric conditioner format in many markets. By moving from a standard dilute conditioner to a concentrated Unilever fabric conditioner packaging waste is reduced by over 60% and GHGs by 37%.
Surf Excel Quick Wash formulation in India has saved as much as two buckets of water a wash per consumer which has lead to approximate savings of around 14 billion litres of water a year in India Comfort Easy Rinse in Vietnam delivered more than 1 billion gallons of water saving in 2007 alone.
