Unilever: design once, deploy everywhere

Unilever has saved enough power to support 40 of its average-sized factories a year, and uses 21% less energy in absolute terms than it did in 2008. Photograph: Ed Oudenaarden/AFP/Getty Images

The Unilever “sustainable living plan” sets ambitious targets in four areas of manufacturing: CO² emissions; renewable energy use; water abstraction and waste.

But with bold targets for 2020, the company has found that inspiring its factory and supply chain workers has multiplied the effect – doubling the pace of CO² emissions reduction, for example, since 2010.

Its premise is simple: apply best practice everywhere.

The results are impressive and the pace of acceleration “unforeseen”, it says. For example, the company has saved enough power to support 40 average-sized Unilever factories a year. It uses 21% less energy in absolute terms than it did in 2008, and 12% more renewable energy.

Since 2008 it has cut CO² emissions from manufacturing by almost one million tonnes, equal to a 38% reduction in absolute terms. It is also abstracting two litres less water in factories for every person in the world each year.

At the same time, the group has brought its 240 factories worldwide to zero non-hazardous-waste-to-landfill status, representing 140 thousand fewer tonnes than in 2008 – the volume of 30 Big Bens.

All this was achieved while avoiding costs of €525m (£380m), helping Unilever attain leadership in the foods sector of the Dow Jones sustainability indices (DJSI) and a “gold class” distinction in the DJSI yearbook 2015.

Unilever introduced its strategy – known as “the compass” – in 2010. The plan is to double the size of the business while reducing its environmental footprint and increasing its positive impact on society .

A “virtual knowledge network” encourages employees to adapt the best solutions to their problems. Progress reports are made available monthly while the top 60 sites get almost real-time environmental performance reporting. This helps to make the best use of resources and targets those opportunities that promise the most improvement.

The approach – called “design once deploy everywhere – is leading to continuous improvement. In addition, Unilever runs a ring-fenced capital investment pool, allocated at factory level, that funds more than 200 of the best projects each year.

Unilever says it is decoupling growth from environmental impact, sharing best practice and ensuring that new-build factories generate less than half of the CO², waste and water abstraction of current ones.