Unilever’s Duplicity Revealed By Reuters Report

A hard-hitting Reuters 22 June 2022 report lays bare Unilever’s hypocrisy about sachets.

Reuters points out that while Unilever has been a vocal critic of sachet packaging it has been lobbying to prevent it being banned.

For several years Unilever executives criticised sachet packaging, saying it is “evil because you cannot recycle it” (Hanneke Faber, Unilever’s President for Global Food & Refreshments in 2019), and “We have to get rid of them… It's pretty much impossible to mechanically recycle and so it's got no real value” (CEO Alan Jope in 2020).

Yet an investigation by Reuters shows that “even as Unilever executives have publicly decried the environmental harm done by this packaging, the multinational has worked to undercut laws aimed at eliminating sachets in at least three Asian countries”.

Reuters goes on to give details of how in “Sri Lanka, the company pressed the government to reconsider a proposed sachet ban, then tried to maneuver around it once regulations were imposed, a senior environmental official told Reuters. In India and the Philippines, Unilever lobbied against proposed sachet bans that were later dropped by lawmakers, sources directly involved said.”

It’s a dispiriting read about a company that knows better.