Unilever has agreed sustainability deals with its top ten retail customers aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions and minimising waste in its supply chain, the CEO said on Monday.
Unilever – which makes Dove soap, Knorr stock cubes and Ben & Jerrys ice cream – was in the wake of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change the consumer industry’s poster child for setting tough sustainability targets.
About two years ago, however, the company came under pressure from investors concerned that its climate strategy was distracting it from growing profits.
Chief executive Hein Schumacher in April changed some of the company’s years-old sustainability goals, leading to both praise from some investors and criticism from climate activists.
'Sustainability Collaboration'
Schumacher said in an interview at the Reuters IMPACT conference on Monday, “What’s new and what’s coming, and what I expect a lot from in the years to come, is (our) collaboration on sustainability agreements with (retail) customers.
“We have a sustainability collaboration agreement…. With Walmart, for example … (The agreement) is about greenhouse gas emission reduction, and we are their Scope 3.”
Scope 3 emissions are those a company is indirectly responsible for across is supply and distribution chain, whereas Scopes 1 and 2 refer to a company’s in-house operations and energy use.
Walmart, one of the ten retailers involved in the deal with Unilever, previously said it was working with suppliers to avoid a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from the global value chain by 2030.
Since it launched the initiative in 2017, suppliers have reported that a total of 574 million metric tonnes of emissions had been reduced or avoided, according to the Walmart website.
Schumacher said Unilever also has to deal with health and beauty retailer AS Watson to create sustainable products such as body wash and toothpaste.
He added that Unilever was using climate-modelling to cut supply chain emissions and make operations more resilient to adverse events like drought.
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