Innovative technology to recycle billions of plastic sachets

Transnational consumer goods company Unilever will pilot an innovative technology to recycle plastic sachets, preventing billions of sachets entering oceans and landfill. 

The multinational manufacturer – which includes brands such as Persil, Radox, Dove, Walls and Marmite – sells billions of products in single-use sachets each year, including cosmetics and food products, particularly in developing and emerging markets.

These plastic sachets will now be recycled through a system called CreaSolv Process, in which the packaging will be recovered and then reused to create new Unilever products – supporting the company’s circular economy ethos.

David Blanchard, Chief Research and Development Officer at Unilever, said: ““Billions of sachets are used once and just thrown away, all over the world, ending up in landfill or in our waterways and oceans. We intend to make this tech open source and would hope to scale the technology with industry partners, so others – including our competitors – can use it.” 

A pilot plant will open in Indonesia in order to test the long-term commercial viability of the CreaSolv Process technology.

Indonesia produces around 64 million tonnes of waste every year of which about 1.3 million tonnes end up in the ocean.

In March this year, Indonesia announced its allocation of up to $1 billion to curb waste products polluting its oceans each year.

Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan stated the country is committed to reducing marine waste by 70 per cent within the next eight years.

Unilever’s development of the sachet recycling technology is the latest move in a series of initiatives to green the company’s operations.

At the beginning of this year, Unilever pledged to ensure all its plastic packaging is “fully reusable, recyclable or compostable” by 2025.

The company had already committed to reducing the weight of its packaging by one-third by 2020 and increasing the use of recycled plastic content in its packaging to at least 25 per cent by 2025 compared to 2015.

For the latest news on sustainability and climate change, sign up to our newsletter here.