A pact signed by Unilever South Africa, the South African Plastics Recycling Organisation (SAPRO), and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) has set an ambitious target of reducing virgin use plastic by 50% by 2025.
The pact was signed in Durban in an effort to tackle plastic pollution in the country.
This comes amid a global drive to eradicate single use plastics.
In Africa up to 80% of waste is recyclable, however, of that percentage only 4% is actually recycled.
Unilever has acknowledged that some of the plastic pollution in the environment has their name on it.
“We want to reduce by 50%, the use of virgin plastic on our supply chain and that is going to come from two ways, simply no plastic anymore from our packaging. A different way to produce and sell products. Two-thirds of that reduction will come from simply the fact that we want to have one-hundred-percent, post-consumer recyclable plastic. Plastic that has been used already. The second part of that announcement is that we want to collect from the environment more plastic than we let out into the environment. In SA for example, we estimate that we sell the equivalent of about 22 tons of plastic,” says Unilever’s Luc-Olivier Marquet.
