Turning Waste into Worth
The Unilever ESG Story
Summary
Unilever operates across 190 countries, marketing roughly 400 brands to 3.4 billion consumers daily. That scale exposes its value chain to plastic waste, agricultural emissions, and social risk across supplier communities, exposures the company manages as core strategy rather than externality.
Through the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan and its successor, the Unilever Compass, the company bound ESG targets to board-level accountability: redesigning packaging for recyclability, scaling regenerative agriculture, financing circular-economy SMEs through the CIRCLE Alliance, and publishing a shareholder-voted Climate Transition Action Plan.
Operational GHG emissions are down 74% since 2010 and plastic collection now exceeds plastic sold, achieved while revenue grew from EUR 59.6 billion to EUR 62.8 billion and net profit rose to EUR 8.2 billion between 2022 and 2024.
What makes Unilever's model different?
ESG is embedded directly in brand strategy and capital allocation, not run as a separate initiative, and Unilever uses its scale to fund shared infrastructure smaller competitors could not build alone.
Full Case Study
Read the complete methodology, results and roadmap in the PDF.
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