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

A core component of Unilever’s new Clean Future, an innovation programme designed by the company’s Home Care division to fundamentally change the way that its cleaning and laundry products are created, manufactured and packaged. Clean Future is unique in its intent to embed the circular economy principles into both packaging and product formulations at the scale of global brands to reduce their carbon footprint.

Most cleaning and laundry products available today contain chemicals made from fossil fuel feedstocks, a non-renewable source of carbon. Unilever’s move to renewable or recycled sources of carbon for these chemicals is a deliberate shift away from the fossil fuel economy. 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.

Unilever is ring-fencing €1bn for Clean Future to finance biotechnology research, CO2 and waste utilisation, and low carbon chemistry - which will drive the transition away from fossil fuel derived chemicals. This investment will also be used to create biodegradable and water-efficient product formulations, to halve the use of virgin plastic by 2025, and 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 cleaning and laundry products with a significantly lower environmental impact.

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