Unilever announces €1 billion investment to eliminate fossil fuels in cleaning products by 2030

Unilever has announced it will replace 100 per cent of the carbon derived from fossil fuels in its cleaning and laundry product formulations with renewable or recycled carbon.

The move is set to transform the sustainability of global cleaning and laundry brands including OMO (Persil), Sunlight, Cif, and Domestos.

This new ambition is a core component of Unilever’s ‘Clean Future’, a ground-breaking innovation programme designed by the company’s Home Care division to fundamentally change the way that some of the world’s most well-known cleaning and laundry products are created, manufactured, and packaged.

The first initiative of its scale, Clean Future is a critical step towards Unilever’s pledge of net zero emissions from its products by 2039.

Peter ter Kulve, Unilever’s President of Home Care, explained: “Clean Future is our vision to radically overhaul our business. As an industry, we must break our dependence on fossil fuels, including as a raw material for our products. We must stop pumping carbon from under the ground when there is ample carbon on and above the ground if we can learn to utilise it at scale.

Unilever is ring-fencing €1 billion for Clean Future, which will finance biotechnology research, CO2 utilisation, low carbon chemistry, biodegradable and water-efficient product formulations, and will halve the use of virgin plastic by 2025.

This investment will also support the development of brand communications that make these technologies appealing to consumers. The Clean Future investment, which is additional to Unilever’s new €1 billion ‘Climate and Nature fund’, is focused on creating affordable cleaning and laundry products that deliver superior cleaning results with a significantly lower environmental impact.

Central to Clean Future is Unilever’s ‘Carbon Rainbow’, a novel approach to diversify the carbon used in its product formulations. Non-renewable, fossil sources of carbon (identified in the Carbon Rainbow as black carbon) will be replaced using captured CO2 (purple carbon), plants and biological sources (green carbon), marine sources such as algae (blue carbon), and carbon recovered from waste materials (grey carbon).

Peter ter Kulve, Unilever’s President of Home Care concludes: “A new bioeconomy is rising from the ashes of fossil fuels.We’ve heard time and time again that people want more affordable sustainable products that are just as good as conventional ones. Rapid developments in science and technology are allowing us to do this, with the promise of exciting new benefits for the people who use our products, from ultra-mild cleaning ingredients to self-cleaning clothes and surfaces.”

“Diversifying sources of carbon is essential to grow within the limits of our planet. Our suppliers and innovation partners play a critical role through this transition. By sharing our Carbon Rainbow model, we are calling on an economy-wide transformation in how we all use carbon.”