Operational Excellence Goal: Eliminate non-hazardous waste to landfill across factories and later extend the model to wider operating sites.
The Journey:
Unilever treated waste as an operational process problem, not just an environmental issue. The company identified different non-hazardous waste streams across its operations and looked for alternative routes for each stream, including reuse, recycling, recovery and conversion into useful materials.
The journey began with the factory network. Once Unilever proved the model across manufacturing sites, it expanded the same thinking to warehouses, distribution centres and offices. This made the improvement scalable: the company was not solving waste one location at a time, but creating a replicable operating model.
By January 2015, Unilever’s global network of more than 240 factories had achieved zero non-hazardous waste to landfill. By February 2016, the achievement had expanded to more than 600 sites across 70 countries. This case is powerful because it shows how operational excellence can convert a broad sustainability ambition into a practical system: identify waste, redesign routes, replicate the model and sustain the standard.
Leave a Reply