Greenpeace UK activists have shut down the entrances to Unilever’s central London headquarters in a plastic pollution protest.
Teams of the campaign group’s UK activists have locked themselves onto barricades made of giant Dove products and a subverted ‘Dead Dove’ version of the brand’s logo, blocking the entrance of Unilever House after claiming that the FMCG giant is “failing” to tackle plastic pollution.
Greenpeace has said that activists are stocked with enough provisions to “continue blocking the entrances for the full day”.
The activists have been joined by seven climbers from Greenpeace who are scaling the walls of the building and working to affix a 13 x 8 metre canvas to the facade, with the artwork featuring a young girl peeling back Dove’s iconic ‘Real Beauty’ branding to reveal what Greenpeace describes as “examples of the toxic plastic waste churned out by the brand”.
A Greenpeace International report released late last year found that Unilever was the largest corporate seller of the “super-polluting” plastic sachets, selling the equivalent of 1,700 a second. An estimated 6.4 billion sachets were produced by Dove alone in 2022, making up over 10% of the consumer goods company’s total sachet sales.
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Greenpeace is calling on Unilever to phase-out single-use plastic from its operations and transition to reuse in the next 10 years, starting with plastic sachets. It is also calling on the company to advocate for this same level of ambition at the UN Global Plastics Treaty by backing a treaty which caps and phases down plastic production by at least 75% by 2040.
The action today (5 September) is the latest escalation in Greenpeace’s ongoing campaign against Unilever and comes after the FMCG giant’s chief executive Hein Schumacher diluted the FMCG giant’s sustainability targets, including ESG goals, earlier this year in a bid to “drive performance in the company”.
It comes ahead of the final round of negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty in November, where Unilever is the chair of the Business Coalition.
Greenpeace UK co-executive director Will McCallum said: “Unilever’s plastic pollution is trashing the planet and harming communities. They hide behind the clean, respectable face of brands like Dove but we’re here today peeling back this facade to show the ugly truth behind it.
“Whether it’s devastating floods or toxic fumes from waste burning, the billions of pieces of plastic waste they’re pumping into the world are exacting a toll on communities far from this London office. There’s no ‘Real Beauty’ in the real harm Dove and Unilever are causing.”
He continued: “This peaceful protest is aimed squarely at Hein Schumacher and Unilever’s executives. Where their predecessors led the way for companies to push the boundaries of what environmental ambition looks like, instead they’ve spearheaded Unilever’s sustainability roll back.
“It’s time for them to take their heads out of the sand and recognise their company needs to change.”
Unilever has been contacted for comment.
