Unilever Australia & New Zealand, a unit of consumer goods maker Unilever, has announced its plan to use at least 25% post-consumer recycled plastic for packaging some of its brands to support the shift to a circular economy.
Image: A Unilever’s TRESemmé shampoo bottle. Photo: courtesy of Jorge Barrios/Wikipedia.
As part of the new initiative, Unilever intends to use Australian sourced post-consumer recycled plastic for bottles of its home and personal care brands including OMO, Dove, Surf, Sunsilk and TRESemmé.
The firm expects the plan to re-circulate approximately 750 tons of recycled plastic each year, equivalent to 100 million plastic bags.
Unilever Australia & New Zealand CEO Clive Stiff said: “We want to give Australians confidence that for each bottle of OMO, Dove, Sunsilk, Surf or TRESemmé they buy, they are giving a new lease on life to the plastic they recycle in their yellow bins. In short, this move diverts plastic away from landfill.
The company plans to source high volumes of locally recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic to manufacture the plastic bottles for its home cleaning and personal care products.
Stiff added: “While we are making good progress on our packaging targets in Australia and New Zealand and this represents a significant step forward, there is more work to do with availability as well as economic and technical feasibility still major barriers in using recycled plastic content across our packaging.
“We also need to continue our work to reduce the amount of packaging we use whilst balancing this with delivering the quality of products our consumers expect.”
In 2017, Unilever pledged to use all of its plastic packaging which is fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.
Earlier, the firm also committed to reduce the weight of its packaging by one third by 2020.
Upon completion of piloting and testing of the new recycled plastic bottles later this year, the company plans to launch them for retail markets next year.
Unilever said at present only 14% of plastic packaging used globally makes its way to recycling plants, a third is left in fragile ecosystems, and 40% ends up in landfill.
Australia’s recycling rate is 65% across all packaging and plastic packaging waste represents an $80bn loss to the global economy each year.
The company said it will start piloting and testing the new recycled plastic bottles over coming months and intends to have the new bottles on shelf as early as possible in 2019.