Our updated 2030 goals are an extension of work we have been doing for years, promoting circularity by designing products for reuse and recyclability and sourcing biobased ingredients and recycled materials. We’ve made significant progress here, and our intent is to hold this line while we shift attention to ensuring 100% of our products and packaging are reused, recycled or degraded. We do not yet have a methodology for tracking if our products are reused or recycled and will prioritize in 2025.

Our Progress

With 95% of the materials and ingredients in our products and packaging coming from sustainable biobased or recycled feedstocks and 89% of our packaging coming from sustainable or recycled feedstock, we’re close to meeting the first two parts of our 2030 Circularity goal.

Plastics are a relatively low-cost and versatile material to procure and use, which is why it’s difficult to replace them. We also know that plastics pose significant environmental and social costs, so we’re committed to the hard work of finding more sustainable alternatives.

At Seventh Generation, plastics are primarily used in our packaging, and to a much smaller extent in our products. This is why we’ve prioritized plastic packaging reductions in our 2030 goals and actively engaged in policy work that works to change the plastics use landscape in the U.S. and force companies in industries like ours to take responsibility for managing their plastics footprints.

These materials include flexible materials like low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and rigid materials including high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and Polypropylene (PP).

In 2023, plastic derived from fossil fuels contributed to 23% of our total plastic use, with the remaining plastic coming from recycled sources. Because of the outsized role fossil fuels and virgin plastics play in the climate crisis, we aim to reduce our reliance on them as much as possible.

Our Progress

By 2030, eliminate 75% petro–based virgin plastic packaging

Over the years, we have prioritized post-consumer recycled content (PCR), which reduces the need for virgin plastic materials and the production of new fossil fuel-based inputs. However, given the mix of materials we source, the current recycling rates, and the available infrastructure for collecting recycled material across the U.S., PCR supply is more reliably available for some materials than for others like PET and LDPE. To advance the system-level changes needed to solve for these problems, we actively supported California’s Plastic Pollution and Packaging Producer Responsibility legislation (CA SB54), which will change the landscape of how corporations are held accountable for the plastic packaging they produce by ensuring its recyclability or compostability and setting goals for overall use reduction. We also participate in the SB54 Implementation Planning group with the National Stewardship Action Council, which is guiding how companies will comply with the regulation. Seventh Generation’s goals and existing tracking systems position us well to gather and track the information to comply with California and other states’ emerging extended producer responsibility regulations, which will ultimately help us meet our own plastics and circularity goals.

By 2030, eliminate 25% total plastic packaging per use

Our 2023 baseline is an estimated 1.6 grams of plastic packing per use. Because both product formulation and packaging design impact plastic packing per use, our work involves exploring strategies such as using less material (lightweighting), new ways to deliver the same product (refills or redesign), alternate materials (substitution), ways to eliminate the need for packaging (concentration), and new products that require less packaging to begin with (new formats).

We have created concentrated formulations of our high volume products including laundry and dishwasher detergents. For dishwasher detergent, a concentrated pack has about 8X less plastic per use than a gel dishwasher detergent. While concentration is a helpful tool, it’s difficult to shift consumers to a new product format. We recently lightweighted our larger format laundry detergent bottles and increased PCR content, which reduced the weight by about 10%. We also created a refill model for our Foam Dishwashing Spray, which we launched in 2023. The refill model allows for reuse of the plastic spray head, reducing the total plastic footprint of the product over its lifetime.

Like most of our priorities, we continue making progress with plastic production. But it is not an area we can impact on our own— it requires that we flex our influence to significantly advance the work.

We knew when we set our Science-Based Climate Target it would be difficult to achieve. Our approved Science-Based Target aims to reduce emissions by 2030 (2012 base-year) including:

• 100% absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions
• 90% absolute Scope 3 GHG emissions from the use of sold products
• 80% total scope 3 emissions from remaining categories

This is an ambitious target because our footprint is almost entirely Scope 3 emissions, and consumer use (e.g., emissions from heating water to use our laundry and dish products) represents 93% of those emissions. We made early progress on our Scope 1 and 2 emissions goals, and much slower progress on our Scope 3 goals. But after several years of dedicated effort without much to show for it, in 2023 our efforts yielded important progress on reducing our Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions.

Our Progress

Scope 1 and Scope 2 target: Achieved! Since 2020, we have reduced our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 100% through partnership with our electric and gas utilities and procurement of clean energy—renewable energy and natural gas.

Scope 3 use of sold products: This continues to be a challenge. Success requires a systems-level shift away from fossil fuel-generated electricity to renewable energy. Such a shift would mean that every time we wash our dishes and laundry, we do it with lower carbon electricity and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions footprint. As we consider how to approach the reality of this challenge this challenge, we’ll continue flexing our influence and building momentum to cut ties, once and for all, with fossil fuels.

Scope 3 remaining categories: We’ve made important progress! Our absolute emissions shrank by 18% from our 2022 footprint, and for the first time since we set our SBTi, they are lower than our 2012 baseline by 4%. Our intensity (or emissions per sales unit of product sold) also continued falling to 38% below our 2012 baseline.

The investments we’ve made in sourcing materials with lower carbon footprints, primarily citrates and packaging materials, and supplier energy footprints are maturing and reducing our overall footprint. Changes in the mix of products we are shipping (e.g., more laundry products and fewer paper products) also has a positive impact on our footprint. Additionally, we’ve implemented up-to-date methodologies to calculate our footprint, which results in more precise tracking of our progress.

The sobering news is that the 4% reduction from our baseline is still a long way from our 80% reduction goal. This means two things. First, we must continue activating our other Climate Fingerprints, such as financed emissions and investments that have the potential to make industry-level impact, such as regenerative palm. Second, we need to think critically about our targets and use the five-year mandatory review of our SBTi to ensure that we’re meeting our full climate action potential.

Many consumers may not be aware that the household products they love to use, while safe and effective, are formulated with ingredients and materials that are derived from fossil fuel-derived inputs (or feedstocks). The production of these inputs generates greenhouse gas emissions. Switching to biobased alternatives could significantly reduce these emissions, with some estimates indicating a 40-80% reduction. As leaders in the movement to transition away from fossil fuel-based inputs, we have been incorporating biobased or plant-based inputs into products for years, starting with our laundry and dish products.

While we prioritize biobased options, we also seek other ways of reducing negative impacts of materials in our formulas. In 2023, two active agents of our cleaning products, citric acid and sodium citrate, accounted for nearly 23% of our greenhouse gas footprint, while fiber-based materials in products and packaging accounted for 20%, making them both key target for interventions. Other strategies for lowering these impacts include substituting lower-impact materials (e.g., recycled content, biobased materials), reducing use, innovating new production processes, or sourcing from partners located closer to our production facilities. In recent years, our teams successfully reduced the use of citric acid and sodium citrate, replacing them with lower carbon alternatives in our 2x and 4x concentrated laundry products and gel dish soap. We also transitioned to more local sources for the remaining materials. While reformulation is a key driver of carbon emissions reductions, it’s also a circularity strategy that can reduce the need for virgin materials, promote a more sustainable model of natural resource use, and serve a reminder of the interconnected nature of our actions (and inactions).

Oil palm derivatives contribute to about one-third of Seventh Generation’s materials-related greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, growing demand in the palm industry has contributed to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and exploitation of farmworkers, making palm oil a key target for intervention. In addition to Responsible Palm Certification for our direct sourcing, we aim to push the industry toward climate-first thinking. In 2023, we invested in two palm projects intended to demonstrate how regenerative agriculture practices could be scaled in the oil palm industry to ultimately improve livelihoods, enhance nature, and drive climate action by restoring forests.

With Wild Asia, a Malaysian-based partner, we’re focused on advancing regenerative agriculture practices with smallholders and large oil palm estates. In 2023, we helped Wild Asia develop a stakeholder-vetted methodology to assess regenerative practices in oil palm and conduct a baseline survey of regenerative practices on farms in the program. Moving forward, we aim to scale use of that methodology and test an approach for incorporating the findings into corporate greenhouse gas inventories.

With Kaleka, a long-time Unilever partner based in Indonesia, we support a landscape-level project to protect forests and trial regenerative management approaches in existing smallholder oil palm farms. In 2023, enrolled farms adopted regenerative agriculture practices including converting from synthetic inputs to organic fertilizers and planting agroforestry crops like lemongrass and ginger within existing oil palm crops. The program also engaged the community in land restoration efforts and provided trainings for forest protection and fire-free land management.

Given the complex nature of how oil palm derivatives travel from field to product, at this time Seventh Generation cannot directly source oil palm from these partners. Our aim is to scale these practices so that regeneratively produced palm becomes the norm, instead of the exception, and can be incorporated into our supply chain.

Seventh Generation products are produced by a trusted network of third-party manufacturing companies, many of whom are long-standing partners. Historically, third-party manufacturing has accounted for about 5% of our Scope 3, non-consumer use greenhouse emissions. Since we don’t have direct control over how our partners manage their facilities, we created our Green Power Program to engage and incentivize emission reduction actions.

This effort has been a multi-year process. It began with educating our suppliers and helping them procure renewable energy credits (RECs). Today we more directly support their efforts to set climate goals, invest in new renewable energy, track waste, and reduce their absolute emissions. In 2023, thirteen of our contract manufacturers had implemented climate action programs, which reduced the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of our products by 2,900 MT CO2e over three years, cutting emissions from our contract manufacturers in half. Moving forward, we plan to engage our remaining contract manufacturers to reduce emissions from this category to zero, and then turn our attention to other key manufacturing partners.

Our groundbreaking 2022 Climate Fingerprints report quantified the impact that cash and investments have on our carbon footprint. Those insights and analysis transformed our strategy and set Seventh Generation on a course of action. As our banking and investment relationships are interconnected with our parent company Unilever, we knew we had to work together to tackle these hidden emissions.

Leaning into our role at Unilever as a “lighthouse,” illuminating the path forward for climate leadership, Seventh Generation encouraged Unilever to participate in an exercise to baseline their financed emissions. We commissioned a report that did both a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of six of Unilever’s primary banking partners. Unilever provided all the necessary data and participated in a review of the findings. We learned that Unilever’s financed emissions from its total cash and cash equivalents are likely to exceed its operational Scope 1 and 2 emissions (CO2e). While we don’t expect this to shift Unilever’s short-term actions on climate, we do see a window for these learnings to shape future strategy and have found we have willing partners in our parent company to implement important change. Together we will continue efforts to learn, engage, and decarbonize our corporate cash.

In the development of our 2022 Fingerprints Report, we learned from our partners at Clean Creatives that we needed to better understand how the millions of dollars we spend annually on creative and marketing services impacted the climate crisis—both positively and negatively. Since we have direct control over most of our creative and marketing service relationships, we started by evaluating the climate-related transparency, goals, business initiatives, and leadership of key agency partners. The results pointed to some key opportunities for advancing a more climate-aligned approach to procuring our marketing and creative services and some challenging obstacles that will require a broader, longer-term strategy.

The result is that we’ve asked our key agency partners to sign the Clean Creatives pledge, which commits them to declining work with fossil fuel clients. Several partners, including our creative and public relations agencies of record, have made the commitment and spoken publicly about the need for the creative industry to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. We’re working with Unilever to make it easier for their other brands to procure fossil free agency support as well. We also continue engaging other brands on the journey to decarbonize their marketing and creative services by sharing our detailed process in a Blueprint Case Study in the hopes that companies worldwide can learn from our experience and take action of their own.