Unilever plots label future

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) has established some high-level targets for the global CPG to improve global health and well-being and reduce the company’s environmental impact. The intention is that, by 2020, Unilever’s growth will be decoupled from its environmental impact, and its positive social impact will increase.

For Unilever’s Dave Hall, global procurement manager for decoration feedstock, labels and packaging have an important, if not dominant, role to play in the realization of the company’s USLP.

While the overall impact of labels is relatively small, when you look at the number of products we offer globally, the impact adds up. Thousands of SKUs alone use labels and shrink sleeves so decoration must be aligned with the global Unilever strategy to reduce environmental impact.’

It is in this light that Unilever has been working with UPM Raflatac on investigating key elements of the lifecycle of its labels, covering topics such as material selection, printing and recyclability. The initial work in this partnership saw the print process modeled and incorporated into the lifecycle analysis (LCA) with input from printers, including flexo, offset, gravure and screen. Three product ranges covering 22 different Unilever labels were used as the basis for the data.