Eliminating fossil carbon in the fight against climate change

Recently, I was joined by Dr. Jennifer Wilcox (@World Resources Institute), Per Klevnas (@Material Economics), and Ben Kellard (@Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership) to explore how the circular economy sits at the heart of the transition to net-zero.

The discussion focused on the need for all actors to come together to scale sustainable solutions, the leadership needed from both business and policymakers, and the need to take a connected viewpoint to avoid unintended consequences.

Per Klevnas argued that materials, including chemicals, have a crucial role to play in achieving net-zero, with research from Materials Economics showing that almost a quarter of emissions come from these products. Of this, half of the emissions from materials can be removed with more circular solutions. He also saw the need for policy to catch up to some of the innovations that industry has already started to undertake. While Dr. Wilcox provided insights into the various pathways to chemicals that do not rely on fossil fuels, including arguing for the reuse of waste materials along the supply chain avoiding emissions in the first place. She also discussed the concept of carbon removal if CO2 is sourced from the atmosphere, highlighting that direct air capture technologies exist today but more work is required to scale up these innovations.

Below, Ben quizzes me some more on the challenges in activating Clean Future.

Peter, we’ve seen companies come out with bold goals to be regenerative or zero-carbon. This is much needed if companies are going to find sustainable ways to meeting the needs of a growing population. How do you see your Clean Future goal unlocking this kind of innovation across the home care portfolio?

Unilever has a strong record in setting bold goals, accompanied by a programme of action. The latter is key. With Clean Future we have set ourselves the deadline of 2030 to achieve 100% transition, giving us ten years to develop and implement innovations and technologies across our Home Care portfolio. 

Importantly, we have committed a €1 billion investment underpinning the programme. Some projects have already started - in India, we’ve partnered with TAC (@tuticorin alkali chemicals and fertilisers limited) and @Carbon Clean to capture CO2 emissions from manufacturing processes to make soda ash, a key ingredient in laundry powders. Our priority now is to scale up the use of proven renewable and recycled sources of carbon across our formulations whilst we unlock more sources through research in parallel.

The programme has been designed with deliberate agility. Who knows what the world will look like in 3, 5 or 10 years and which technology will emerge? Future allocation of funds will depend on new opportunities that arise over the next decade, including successes we see in our pilot programmes or new promising technologies that need investment to become more commercially viable.

I see, and of course Unilever can do a lot internally, but during the discussion we also saw that there are a lot of clean chemical technologies out there already, but many of them are at an early stage and not yet ready to deliver the scale needed. How do you plan to engage your supply chain to scale these technologies?

One of the measures of success for Clean Future is how well we bring our partners, incumbent and new, along on our journey to achieve our goals.

Reinventing age-old chemistry is a big transformation of our business, including the wider supply chain and there is still much to do to develop and scale up the relevant technologies.

The €1 billion investment I mentioned earlier is focused solely on Clean Future R&D initiatives to accelerate the research performed by partners on promising technologies. It centres on de-risking our partners’ investments by giving them the opportunity of the utilisation of their technologies at large commercial scale. The scale makes the business case work for our partners to invest, and our focus is therefore on making their technologies applicable to our home care products. We are also looking into more creative ways to partner with suppliers, particularly smaller ones who may lack capital.

It's clear that it will require big changes to decarbonize the chemicals industry. So having the right policy framework that supports the development and scaling of clean, circular products will be important. While the UK & EU now have zero carbon targets and the circular economy is rising up the agenda, where do you see the main opportunities to create the necessary enabling regulation?

It’s simple, we can only achieve a cleaner future through collaboration. The policy framework is key in unlocking the potential of what we’re driving. But across markets, current legislation and policies do not foster the development and widespread deployment of clean technologies; what’s more, the application of circular economy principles beyond packaging is largely ignored in policy discussions.

Creating an ecosystem of supportive policies and stakeholder collaboration is critical to help shift practices in our value chain. Policymakers need to accelerate the shift to a low carbon economy with clear net-zero goals, and interim targets for 2025 or 2030. We need government to embrace renewable carbon and support the circular economy of carbon in the same way they are supporting the circular economy of plastic through things like: petrochemical emission reduction targets, integrated policies, support for research, and tracking progress. Doing so will have the benefit of creating an even stronger momentum to solve the plastic issue and reduce the emissions from the spectrum of petrochemicals.

Are there any particular gaps you see in the need to collaborate or types of collaborators you would like to hear from?

We want to hear from everyone. Different groups – from policymakers to consumers– have unique yet vital roles to play in tackling the climate crisis. One group that is crucial when we think about progress in this area and the public debate around it is civil society. As we see on an almost daily basis, civil society has the power to galvanise and influence regulators, businesses, and consumers. We already work closely with some civil society groups, such as WWF and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and we only see these relationships growing.