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Unilever strives towards positive change and sustainable growth through its business, brands, and partnerships. One of Unilever’s 2020 goals is to encourage more than one billion people to take action in order to improve their health and well-being. In 2004, Unilever launched a Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP) to educate young women about self-esteem through its educational programs. Since 2005, the DSEP campaign has helped more than 35 million young people to raise their self-esteem and realize their full potential. Another way that Unilever works toward contributing to the establishment of a healthier and stronger community is through its advancement of hygiene behavior. In Indonesia, Unilever provided training, cleaning equipment packages, and guidance on how to effectively clean mosques. This movement reached over to 50 000 community members around the mosques throughout the year, who joined the Mosque Cleaning activities. Moreover, Unilever also thrives towards creating a better educational system to ensure that children all over the world are granted full access to education. One of Unilever’s laundry brands, Persil, works in collaboration with UNICEF, helping 0 million children in Brazil, Vietnam, and India to gain a good quality education. Furthermore, Unilever claimed to make 00 percent of its plastic packaging recyclable, reusable, and compostable by 2025 through its ‘Zero waste to nature’ objective. CreaSolv technology, operating to recycle flexible plastic waste into raw materials, was started by Unilever in 207. This approach enabled the recycling and utilization of rejected ice cream and wastewater treatment to transform into high protein and high-quality cattle feed. Unilever announced that since 200, its total waste footprint per consumer use has been reduced by 3%. However, Unilever continues to progress even further by leading towards a circular economy for all its packaging materials and exploring different materials such as aluminum, paper, and glass. One example of sustainable packaging set off in 209 is Loop, an innovative waste-free shopping, and delivery model. When products are shipped to consumers, they are then returned and refilled. This shift in approach makes the model ‘durable’ rather than ‘disposable.’ Signal also launched its refillable toothpaste tablets, which require less water than regular toothpaste but are still made to be used the same way. Lastly, Unilever reported that it would source its agricultural raw materials 00 percent sustainably by 2020. Moreover, it also claimed to source these raw materials from small-scale farmers. More specifically,

in 202, Unilever committed to working with at least 500,000 smallholder farmers in its supply network, so that they can improve their agricultural practices. Overall, it is distinct that Unilever attempts to satisfy the requirements to become a complete B Corporation, and although, several of Unilever’s brands have already achieved a B-Corp certification such as Ben & Jerry’s, as a whole company Unilever has not yet fully reached its potential of an accomplished B Corporation, and here is why.
Unilever is one of the largest buyers of vanilla in the world. It purchases 8% of all vanilla from Madagascar for ice cream production. However, in Madagascar, there is unsustainable farming and child labor. According to the International Labor Organization, child labor in vanilla production affects one-third of all children in Madagascar between the ages of 2 and 7. Nevertheless, Unilever denies any connection with those farmers and merely stated that child labor was unacceptable, but no extra support or policies on behalf of the company were provided. Controversially to its aim to empower 5 million women and improve the livelihoods of 800,000 smallholder farmers throughout the value chain by 2020, land-grabbing and the exploitation of women are ignored by Unilever. Furthermore, Unilever extracts oil from Wilmar International, an oilseed processing company, which was accused of illegal activities in the forest and land clearing in 20. Nevertheless, Unilever still continues to purchase palm oil from Wilmar. According to the investigation conducted by Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization focused on human rights, women, who work on palm plantations owned by Wilmar, are being threatened and forced to work long hours with minimum wage earnings of up to US dollars 2.50 a day. Children between the ages of eight to fourteen must do hard physical work, carry heavy containers of palm fruit that can weigh from 2 to 25 kilograms, and often drop out of school to help their parents on the plantations. The working conditions are not safe either as workers sometimes suffer severe injuries from toxic chemicals still used in the plantations despite being banned in the EU and by Wilmar itself. Unilever affirmed that they source palm oil from Wilmar but did not respond to Amnesty International’s questions about which refineries they source from. WWF judged how much did companies make progress toward phasing out unsustainable palm oil from supply chains. Unilever scored 4.75 out of 22 in the WWF table. This indicates that more effort could still be made on behalf of Unilever to combat this ongoing issue.