Strategy and goals

We’re pursuing a circular economy approach – one in which resources are kept in use in a closed-loop system, rather than thrown away – across every aspect of our business. This will help us cut our dependence on new raw materials, and use previously wasted materials.

We’ve set ambitious and interrelated goals to reduce our waste footprint. This includes goals across plastics and packaging, food waste and other waste from our factories and operations. We won’t achieve our strategy unless we tackle waste while finding innovative ways to reduce, reuse and repeatedly recycle materials in a circular system.

We’re completely rethinking our approach to packaging and our framework of ‘less plastic, better plastic, no plastic’ guides everything we do. It’s underpinned by goals to halve our use of virgin plastic, to ensure all our packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable and increasing the use of recycled plastics. We’re also supporting better waste infrastructure to collect and process plastic packaging.

Plastic is a valuable material but there’s a lot of plastic pollution in the environment – some with our name on it – and that’s not okay with us. Plastic pollution is too big for us to solve alone. We’re advocating for systems change, including better regulation, infrastructure, new business models and funding mechanisms to create a circular economy for plastics. Systemic change requires a co-ordinated international response so we're working with suppliers, governments and other partners to advocate for tough global action, including a UN treaty to provide the global framework that’s needed to set out pathways to solving plastic pollution.

In our own operations, we’re continuing more than a decade of work to reduce waste in our factories and ensure we send zero non-hazardous waste to landfill. And we’re finding innovative solutions to reuse, recycle or recover resources at every opportunity. Where we’ve not been able to find ways to refuse or reduce waste, we look for routes to reuse or recycle it. And if these solutions aren’t available, we recover energy from the waste.

As one of the largest food manufacturers in the world, we want to help tackle food loss and waste . We’re starting in our own operations by halving food waste from factory to shelf. Together with partners, we’re going far beyond this with innovative collaborations to reduce food loss and waste right across the food system. Our brands are finding new ways to put unwanted foods or by-products like unused ice creams, that would otherwise be wasted, to good use. We’re also inspiring and enabling consumers to cut their food waste footprint and be more resourceful with leftover food.