A 10 ft Dove bottle artwork and powerful images of the brand’s plastic waste flanked the entrance to Unilever HQ this morning as Greenpeace UK brought the plastic pollution crisis to the company’s front door.
The 10 ft Dove bottle installation featured Greenpeace’s radical new subversion of Dove’s branding. This included its rebrand of the Dove’s iconic ‘Real Beauty’ strapline to read “Real Harm” as part of the new campaign calling for an end to the company’s devastating plastic pollution. The artwork highlights calls for company staff to push the brand and its owner to take action.
The images document real life evidence of highly-polluting plastic sachets from the Unilever signature brand. This waste was uncovered by Greenpeace campaigners, much of it discarded on beaches and waterways in the Philippines and Indonesia. The installation also included images and hard-hitting quotes from women from communities impacted by Dove’s plastic waste.
A new report published this week by Greenpeace International revealed the company expects to sell 1,700 highly-polluting plastic sachets every single second in 2023, fuelling the global plastic pollution crisis and dumping huge amounts of waste on countries in the Global South.
Greenpeace is calling on Dove and its parent company Unilever to phase out single-use plastic from its operations and transition to reusable packaging in the next 10 years, starting with the worst offenders: plastic sachets. Greenpeace is also calling on the company to advocate for this same level of ambition at the ongoing UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations and to back a treaty which caps and phases down plastic production by at least 75% by 2040..
Anna Diski, plastics campaigner at Greenpeace UK said:
Dove has got to change. Too many communities in countries like the Philippines and Indonesia are being harmed by the huge amounts of damaging plastic waste they’re pumping out. The same women and girls they claim to champion are being left to deal with the impacts of this waste. It’s a stain on the brand – one which can only be scrubbed clean with real action. That’s why we’re at their offices today, talking to staff, letting them know what tackling the plastics crisis looks like and how they can help.
Together we can push Dove and its owners Unilever to stop selling plastic sachets now, commit to phasing out single-use plastic within a decade and advocate for this same level of ambition at UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations.
ENDS
Images: https://media.greenpeace.org/collection/27MZIFJFBZEQ1
