How They Did it: Unilever’s Journey to “Zero Waste to the Landfill”

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the December 2015 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

December 2015

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On June 11, 2015, nearly 200 people gathered at a venue in central London, for a sustainability conference hosted by Unilever. The event brought together Unilever employees and suppliers; representatives from academia, NGOs, and sector companies including Mars, GSK and Sainsbury’s, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and PwC.

In part, they had come together to celebrate a milestone: In January, Unilever announced that it had achieved 100 percent zero waste to the landfill across 242 industrial sites in 67 countries that manufactured products for brands such as Magnum, Knorr, Dove, and Domestos. The project had involved some 1,000 Unilever employees around the world. The goal was reached in December 2014, when the last plant, in Trinidad and Tobago, went to zero ahead of the company’s original 2020 target date.

But it wasn’t just Unilever partners in the room. Tony Dunnage, the Unilever group manufacturing sustainability director who oversaw the zero waste initiative, also invited some competitors to encourage other businesses to get on board. “If you think about it, our achievement was a drop in the ocean,” says Dunnage. “Our thinking was: Let’s invite other industry leaders and promote the zero waste mindset. Let’s stir it up and extend our reach.”

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