A New Plan A?

Unilever has unveiled it's Sustainable Living Plan - and on the surface it looks a lot like the M&S Plan A. There are some bold targets - halving the environmental impact of their products is, for instance, one of their headlines. When one delves a little more closely this actually translates into halving GHG emissions, water use and end-of-life waste; and sourcing 100% of their agricultural raw materials sustainably. And delving even further there is an interesting mix of "hard" technical targets and "softer" social action ones. In my quick wizz through I spotted that they aim to change their customers' showering habits, quite correctly identifying that the biggest impact from their shower products is the amount of time that people spend under the shower using them. We know that heating water is a significant source of CO2 emission from domestic premises. All this is within the context of Unilever still growing, so there is still the whole natural resources demand issue to tackle but if they can pull off what they claim to be targeting it willl be a significant step forward and might even have a wider market impact.