The Hague (AFP)

Like Unilever, which announced Monday it wants to halve its packaging by 2025, multinationals are multiplying promises against consumers who are turning away more and more plastic, at the risk of being accused of "greenwashing".

"By 2025, Unilever will guarantee a halving of its plastic packaging and will collect and process more plastic packaging than it markets," the group said in a statement Monday.

The Anglo-Dutch giant, whose "plastic footprint" is about 700,000 tons per year, promises to accelerate the use of recycled plastic and end the automatic use of individual packaging products, such as as ice creams or soaps.

The group with 400 brands (Knorr, Lipton, Magnum, Dove ...) joins other large companies that have put the fight against plastic ahead in recent months.

The Swiss group Nestlé has also already broken a series of promises by 2025: make 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable and increase by up to 35% the recycled content in its bottles. plastic.

Nestlé, owner of more than 2,000 brands, including Perrier and S.Pellegrino, for example, has reviewed the packaging of its cocoa drink Nesquik and wants to test reusable packaging for its ice cream Häagen-Dazs.

At Starbucks, the removal of plastic straws is planned for 2020, at Disneyland, it is planned to put an end to small bottles of shampoo and in the United Kingdom, some supermarkets have outright banned plastic from their shelves.

What to anticipate in part the future European regulation that will ban straws, coffee sticks, balloon stems and expanded polystyrene food packaging by 2021.

But beyond the legislative constraint, companies are mainly facing the growing pressure of some consumers, increasingly demanding on the eco-responsibility of their daily purchases.

- "Awareness" or "green paint stroke"? -

"We need to stay relevant to younger consumers, and we know that (...) this future generation is really concerned about the meaning and the environmental impact, and the behavior of the brands it buys," he said. Alan Jope, the boss of Unilever, at the BBC.

"There is a general awareness of consumers who alert both the government and producers," says AFP Grégory Bressolles, a marketing professor at Kedge Business School.

"Companies are becoming aware of the need to have a lower impact on the environment, they are giving themselves a more environmentally friendly image, but that is not done immediately," he says, warning. against "the effects of announcement and strokes of green paint".

This is not Unilever's first announcement on the subject. The group of 160,000 employees is thus committed to a zero deforestation program and a "responsible" approach to choosing suppliers of meat, palm oil and soybeans, among others.

He has also bought the American brand of environmentally friendly cleaning products The Laundres and a Dutch "vegetarian butcher" De Vegetarische Slager.

Some 30 multinationals such as BASF, Total, ExxonMobil, Suez, Veolia and Procter & Gamble have created an alliance to mobilize more than one billion euros to find solutions to eliminate plastic waste.

"These same boxes are investing at the same time much larger sums to increase plastic production capacity.For us, it's downright cynical at this stage," denounces Laura Chatel, head of advocacy for the association Zero Waste France .

Some 80% of plastics end up in the oceans, or between 8 and 12 million tons each year, according to the UN, which estimates that if the trend continues, there will be more plastics than fish in the ocean. here 2050.

Only 9% of the 9 billion tonnes of plastic the world has ever produced has been recycled. A little more - 12% - was cremated, according to a UN report released last year.

© 2019 AFP