Unilever on the green high road

by Tamara Pitelen

I recently had a fight with the Chairman of Unilever MENA, Sanjiv Mehta.  Well, ‘fight’ is a strong word, there were no fisticuffs, Sanjiv did not pull my hair nor I his. ‘Heated disagreement’ is probably more accurate. It was at the Unilever MENA conference on the first year of its Sustainable Living Plan.

I recently had a fight with the Chairman of Unilever MENA, Sanjiv Mehta.  Well, ‘fight’ is a strong word, there were no fisticuffs, Sanjiv did not pull my hair nor I his. ‘Heated disagreement’ is probably more accurate. It was at the Unilever MENA conference on the first year of its Sustainable Living Plan.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan was launched globally in 2010, it was rolled out in MENA in 2011 year ago and the ethos is commendable. Unilever’s aim is to double the size of its business while halving its global environmental footprint by 2020.
Sanjiv gave the opening speech…
“I am a capitalist at heart,” he said, “…however capitalism is not a cure for all ills. If you look around us, one third of the population still lives below the poverty line and if you look at the way we are consuming our natural resources, it is at a rate that is one and a half times more than the earth’s ability to replenish resources. If you were to compare with the rate at which Western Europe is consuming, we would need three planets.
“There are more than two billion people living in water scarce regions of the world… about a billion people go to bed hungry every day, and every six seconds a child dies of malnutrition.”
So far so sobering and if Sanjiv was running for office, he’d have my vote. He continues…
“In 2010, Unilever launched the Sustainable Living Plan. And the whole idea of a sustainable living plan was to create a new business model. What are we talking about when we speak about Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan? We are not talking about charity; we are not talking about philanthropy, we are not talking about cause-related marketing, we are talking about a new business model where we decouple our growth agenda from our environmental footprint. We cannot in the world today spend ourselves or waste  ourselves to prosperity, that’s absolutely impossible, that’s not the kind of planet we want to leave for our children and grandchildren, that’s the reason why we have looked at creating a new business model…
“Our vision is very clear, that we will be doubling our business while we reduce our environment footprint. It is not at the cost of growth. We are not saying that we will stop growing to reduce our environmental footprint, what we are saying is that we will decouple growth with our [environment impact]. We are saying that, while we double our business, we will halve our environmental footprint, it is an audacious goal.”
Indeed it is. But kudos to Unilever, they’ve made some great strides. Some highlights are:

• 36 per cent of all their agricultural raw materials were sustainably sourced by the end of 2012 and by 2020 their aim is to source 100 per cent of all agricultural raw materials sustainably.
• Waste impact per consumer has been reduced by seven per cent
• Their greenhouse gas impact per consumer has been reduced by six per cent since 2010

The biggest achievement in my opinion though is the switch to only using palm oil from certified sustainable sources. Unilever is one of the world’s largest buyers of palm oil for use in products such as margarine, ice cream, soap and shampoo. They purchase around 1.3 million tonnes annually, which is about three per cent of the world’s total production.
The human race's use of palm oil has been destroying the planet.
On the Unilever website it states: “More than 80 per cent of palm oil is grown in Indonesia and Malaysia and the rapid expansion of the industry has accelerated deforestation. An area the size of Greece is cleared every year. Deforestation accounts for some 20 per cent of all greenhouse gases – making Indonesia the third-highest emitter after the US and China.”
The other big achievement for Unilever, I think, is tea.
Sanjiv said: “Two out of every three cups of tea that are consumed in this region are Liptons tea. And what we are saying is that 100 per cent of the Liptons tea in teabags will be sourced from sustainable sources as certified by the Rainforest Alliance by 2015. And 100 per cent of the tea consumed in tea packets as well will be sourced from sustainable by 2020. It’s a big goal but we are on track and I’m absolutely confident that by 2015 whatever tea bag you consume with the brand Lipton you will be guaranteed that it is sourced from sustainable sources.”
So, good on Unilever for all it is attempting to achieve by way of reducing its impact on Mother Earth. However, some of the points Sanjiv made regarding environmental ‘successes’ of Unilever were not so convincing and smacked to me of ‘green washing’. Namely, the assertion that the increased use of Lifebuoy hand soap has saved water – an increasingly scarce resource.
Sanjiv’s argument was that Lifebuoy kills 99.9 per cent of germs in 10 seconds while conventional soap takes 20 seconds – a 50 per cent water reduction!
Sanjiv said: “Lifebuoy handwash kills 99.9 per cent of germs in just 10 seconds. Ordinary soaps can take up to 20 seconds which means you save up to 50 per cent of water while you kill germs. Switch to Lifebuoy handwash and save water.”
Whaaaat? To me this was a nonsensical deduction. Do people have a stopwatch running while washing their hands? Does anyone really think, ‘just another two seconds of rubbing and all those germs will be dead!’
Sanjiv was happy to report that sales of Lifebuoy had grown 25 per cent in the last couple of years. Which means a whole lot more plastic waste produced when the bottles end up in landfill not to mention all the water used to actually make the handwash.
Sanjiv didn’t like the word ‘nonsensical’.  He suggested I wasn’t clever enough to understand the logic.
Unilever, you seem to be genuinely making great efforts to reduce your carbon footprint. For that I heartily commend you! Really I do. I wish more huge companies were making more efforts in this area. But don’t go casting doubt over the real achievements you’ve made by lumping them in with claims that don’t seem to bear scrutiny.
Come on, people buying more of your products is not saving the world’s water supplies. For a start, water is the first or second biggest ingredient in many of your products… I happen to have two of them here, a tube of Signal toothpaste and bottle of Lux body wash.
Water is the primary ingredient for the Lux while the second ingredient is Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLS), a common foaming agent that has come under scrutiny for safety and potential toxicity issues. I’m sure you know that all SLS does is make a product foam, which people believe is getting them cleaner. But it’s not, is it. SLS has no impact on getting anyone cleaner, does it, it just makes foam.
In fact, SLS is a toxin that easily penetrates the skin and enters the blood stream. SLS has shown up in the tissues of the brain, liver, heart and other vital organs. There’s a whole host of other dodgy sounding ingredients in the Lux bodywash as well, things with names like methylchloroisothiazolinone but I won’t go into those now or this blog will end up a book.
Let’s have a quick look at the Signal toothpaste. Water is the second biggest ingredient and good old SLS has sneaked is as well – to make people think all that foam is getting their teeth cleaner.
Unilever, if you insist that the growth in sales of Lifebuoy hand wash have indeed meant the world has seen a 50 per cent reduction in the use of water for equivalent levels of handwashing over the last two years, fine, get back to me with an explanation that even thickie stupidos like me can understand. Email me that explanation and I will add it to this blog.
tamara@cpifinancial.net

Notes on a scandal

by Isla MacFarlane

Money talks – and the decision to remove the only female face from Bank of England banknotes says it all 

Ada Lovelace

Since news broke that social reformer Elizabeth Fry was to be retired from Bank of England banknotes and replaced with Sir Winston Churchill feminist campaign groups have been in uproar, furious at seeing their gender’s contribution to their nation further marginalised in the history books.

It was hardly a surprising choice, seeing as how any Brit educated within the last 20 years thinks British history consists solely of England saving the world from Germans, and it says everything about just how out of touch the suited men at the Bank of England are with the people who carry those notes around.

In a rather patronising attempt to placate the masses, Britain has been promised a female understudy should Churchill’s banknote fall victim to a spike in fraud. And the hotly-tipped contestant? English author Jane Austen, often mistakenly referred to as the first writer of chick lit.

Even as a fan of the author’s books, I can’t help feeling this populist choice is a patronising, further under-valuation of women’s contribution to British history. Surely there are more worthy choices who have contributed more to the making of Britain, even to literature?

If we must have the Second World War connection, why not the lesser-known Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling – the engineer who created a simple but brilliant solution to correct a serious defect in the Rolls-Royce Merlin, which powered the RAF to victory?

Or how about Rosalind Franklin, whose critical discoveries about the fine molecular structures of DNA helped the world understand how genetic information is passed on from parents to children?

And has everyone forgotten about Ada Lovelace who, as creator of the world’s first computer algorithm, is often considered the world's first computer programmer?

We’ve had iconic nurse Florence Nightingale on a banknote in the past, but heaven forbid we promote Margaret Ann Bulkley, a.k.a. James Barry, the pioneering British military surgeon who had to live her adult life as a man to successfully carry out vital work improving conditions for wounded soldiers and native inhabitants.

If we must confine women’s achievements to the creative arts, England’s first professional female literary writer Aphra Behn, philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, social reformer Annie Bessant or revolutionary journalist Mary Anne Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, all seem more influential choices.

It is argued Jane Austen is a relevant choice given how prominently money features in her work, but, while she is and will rightly remain enduringly popular, is she as relevant today as 10 years ago?

Adaptations of her work peaked in the ‘90s, more recently Hollywood has been showcasing the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Victor Hugo, who wrote of the great chasms between the rich and poor.

On that note, perhaps Jane Austen’s contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell who documented the struggles of the poor, wrote of the growing resentment between underpaid workers and overpaid masters and tensions between step families would be a more relevant choice for today’s world?

This is not to decry Jane Austen’s work, of which I am a huge fan, or devalue the fast-paced comedy, biting irony and social commentary she contributed to the world of literature.

It just seems a safe choice made by men believing they are choosing a token woman for women, instead of acknowledging a person who has contributed to their world – perhaps, even today, that would be too threatening.

Of course, if one wanted to be really radical, one could suggest there is room for more than one female candidate on the seven banknotes currently in circulation.