Around 2018 and 2019, almost every major personal care and packaging company on earth announced a sustainability pledge. Most had a 2025 deadline. Unilever pledged to halve its use of virgin plastic. Procter & Gamble committed to making all its packaging recyclable or reusable. L’Oréal set targets for refillable and recyclable packaging across its cosmetics range. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — the two largest plastic-packaging users in the world — both committed to major reductions in virgin plastic by the same date. The announcements were coordinated with press campaigns, investor briefings and glossy sustainability reports.

That deadline has now passed. This is an honest scorecard of what actually got delivered, what got quietly walked back, and what the independent audits show — written from the point of view of someone building a small refillable personal care brand from the outside.

The original pledges, in plain English

Unilever announced in October 2019 that it would halve its use of virgin plastic by 2025, cut absolute plastic packaging use by more than 100,000 tonnes, and help collect and process more plastic packaging than it sells. The announcement was made under then-CEO Alan Jope and received extensive press coverage at the time.

Procter & Gamble published its Ambition 2030 goals, including a commitment that 100% of its packaging would be recyclable or reusable by 2030, with interim 2025 milestones on virgin resin reduction and consumer-recyclable design.

L’Oréal’s “For The Future” programme, announced in 2020, set targets for 100% of plastic packaging to be refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2030, with 2025 interim milestones on recycled content.

Coca-Cola’s “World Without Waste” strategy set a 2025 target of making 100% of its packaging recyclable, and a 2030 target of collecting a bottle or can for every one it sells.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitment — the framework most of these pledges sit under — was signed by more than 500 organisations, including all of the above, and required annual public progress reporting.

Those are the public promises, in the companies’ own words. The interesting bit is what happened between the announcement and the deadline.

What actually got delivered by 2025

The short honest answer is: less than promised, in most cases significantly less, and in several cases with the deadline itself quietly moved.

Unilever announced in April 2024 — almost a year before its own 2025 deadline — that it was extending its virgin plastic reduction target from 50% to a smaller commitment on a longer timeline. The company said the original goal had been “too ambitious” and reframed the targets. The rollback was widely reported by Reuters, the Financial Times, the BBC and the Guardian. Wild, the refillable deodorant brand Unilever had acquired in 2023, was one of many sub-brands sitting inside the group at the time of the announcement.

Procter & Gamble has continued to publish annual progress reports, but Break Free From Plastic’s independent Global Brand Audit has placed P&G in the top ten most-collected corporate plastic polluters worldwide every year the audit has been published. The 2030 recyclability target technically remains in place; the 2025 interim milestones on virgin resin reduction have been described in the most recent annual sustainability report as “progress in line with a revised timeline.”

L’Oréal’s 2023 acquisition of Aesop for $2.5 billion, and its ongoing investment in refill programmes in specific European markets, showed real movement in some product lines. Group-wide targets on recycled plastic content have progressed but, according to the company’s own progress reports, not at the pace originally described.

Coca-Cola announced in December 2024 that it was walking back its 2030 reusable-packaging targets, dropping the previously stated goal of 25% reusable packaging by that date. The move was reported by Reuters, the Financial Times and the Guardian. The 100% recyclable-by-2025 packaging target was described in the most recent sustainability update as “progressing at pace.”

Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s final Global Commitment progress report, published in late 2024, concluded that the collective 2025 targets set by signatories were not going to be met, and that a substantial share of signatories had either revised their targets or missed reporting deadlines.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Announce with a five- to seven-year horizon. Publish annual progress reports that describe steady work. Approach the deadline. Redefine the target. Extend the timeline. Frame it as pragmatic. Move on.

Why the gap exists

This is not a story about bad people. It is a story about a structural conflict.

The core problem is that all of these companies have growth-oriented business models. Their share price, their executive compensation, their quarterly investor calls and their long-term strategic plans all assume selling more units next year than this year. A pledge to halve virgin plastic while also growing unit volume requires either (a) genuinely revolutionary redesign of the whole product line, (b) very large investment in recycled input supply chains that were not yet reliable at scale in the mid-2020s, or (c) a fundamental shift toward refill formats that reduce the number of units sold. Options (a) and (c) directly conflict with growth. Option (b) has moved, but slowly.

None of the major players chose option (c) at scale. A few acquired small refill-format brands — Unilever bought Wild, Method and Seventh Generation before it — but the acquired brands typically sit as small line items inside portfolios still overwhelmingly driven by single-use plastic units. The parent company’s core P&L keeps depending on selling more tubes, more bottles, more sachets each year, even as the sub-brand shelves display the refill story.

The maths does not resolve itself. Which is why the pledges tend to get quietly rewritten as they approach the deadline.

What independent accountability looks like

Break Free From Plastic, a global movement of more than 12,000 organisations, has published an annual Global Brand Audit since 2018. Volunteers collect, count and categorise plastic waste from beaches, rivers and streets in dozens of countries, then tally which corporate brands appear most frequently. The audit does not measure production; it measures what actually shows up in the environment. It is one of the few citizen-led datasets that cuts through corporate reporting.

Every year the audit has been published, Coca-Cola has been in the top position or top three. Procter & Gamble and Unilever have appeared in the top ten in every published edition. The ranking does not shift meaningfully in response to the pledges being announced or renewed — because environmental presence is a lagging indicator of production over previous years, and production has kept climbing.

The ChangingMarkets Foundation, which publishes investigative reports on greenwashing in the fashion, plastics and personal care industries, has similarly documented the recurring gap between announced pledges and delivered outcomes across the sector.

These are the independent scoreboards. They matter because the corporate sustainability reports are the only source most shoppers ever see — and those reports are, structurally, marketing documents. Independent audits are the corrective.

A founder note on how a small brand measures itself

I have spent the last five years building Lifelong Deo, a refillable natural deodorant brand. We do not publish an annual sustainability report. We do not have a five-year plastic pledge. What we have is a design brief: the applicator is used for years, only the plant-based active refill is replaced, and the refill packaging is fully compostable rather than plastic. That is measured not in a report but in the physical fact of what leaves our warehouse and what arrives in a customer’s bathroom.

Lifelong Luxe is our anodised aluminium applicator, engineered to last a lifetime and backed with a no-questions-asked replacement guarantee. Lifelong Vibes is the accessible ocean-bound recycled plastic version, made in partnership with TIDE, for people who want the refillable format at a lower entry price. Both use the same plant-based refills, which arrive in a fully compostable pouch. The refill is the whole point — because the only version of the plastic story that ends well is the one where the tube never had to be made in the first place.

That is not a pledge. It is a product design. It ships every day, and every refill is measurable in a way that a corporate five-year commitment is not. That was the whole design brief, and it is the reason we chose not to sell to a larger company on the way through — because you cannot build a refill-first brand inside a company whose profits depend on selling more units every year. The maths does not work.

A shopper’s checklist for reading sustainability claims

If you want to sanity-check a sustainability commitment from any brand — large or small — four questions do most of the work.

• What is the actual deadline? “By 2030” or “by 2040” deadlines announced today are, in practice, aspirations that current management will not be accountable for. Ask what changes this quarter, this year.
• Is the target on unit volume or virgin material? A 50% reduction in virgin plastic while unit volume doubles is not a plastic reduction. The two metrics need to be read together.
• Is there independent verification? A pledge audited by a big-four accountant is still an audit of the company’s own numbers. An external NGO audit (Break Free From Plastic, Ellen MacArthur) tells you what is actually happening in the environment.
• What is the format? Refillable and truly reusable formats remove units from the plastic economy. Recycled and recyclable formats slow the plastic economy but do not exit it. Recyclability is not the same thing as circular.

The honest summary

Most of the major 2025 plastic pledges were not met. Several were quietly rewritten or extended in the months before the deadline. The independent audits show that corporate plastic presence in the environment has not meaningfully declined. This is not a failure of individual people at those companies — it is a structural conflict between growth-oriented business models and unit-reduction commitments.

The bright spot, insofar as there is one, is that the independent audits exist, the reporting cycle is now well understood, and the shoppers reading pieces like this one are increasingly asking the right questions. Small independent brands making refill formats do not fix the problem at scale on their own — but they do prove that the alternative is possible, and the alternative is what the corporate pledges kept promising and kept moving.

That is the version of accountability we can actually see from the outside. It is worth reading the annual audits and the sustainability reports side by side — and drawing your own conclusions.

Further reading

• Wild Deodorant Sold To Unilever: What It Really Means For Sustainable Shoppers — the acquisition story that opened this series.
• Native Deodorant Sold To P&G: What Sustainable Shoppers Should Know — the second acquisition-story piece.
• Where Does UK Plastic Waste Actually Go? An Honest 2026 Breakdown — what happens after the recycling bin.
• The Lifelong Deo blog — more honest guides on natural personal care, plastic waste and independent beauty brands.

Frequently asked questions

Did any Big Beauty company meet its 2025 plastic pledge?

Some companies made real progress on individual metrics — recycled content in specific packaging lines, expansion of refill offerings in specific markets. But group-wide, none of the major personal care and packaging companies met their headline 2025 targets in full. Several publicly extended their deadlines or reframed the goals in the months before 2025.

Which pledge got walked back most publicly?

Unilever’s April 2024 reset of its virgin-plastic-reduction target and Coca-Cola’s December 2024 rollback of its 2030 reusable-packaging goal were both widely reported by Reuters, the Financial Times, the BBC and the Guardian at the time of announcement.

Where can I read the independent audits?

The Break Free From Plastic Global Brand Audit is published annually, usually in the autumn. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation publishes annual Global Commitment progress reports. The ChangingMarkets Foundation publishes investigative reports on greenwashing across the plastics, fashion and personal care industries. All are publicly available and free to read.

Are there any Big Beauty companies genuinely leading on refill?

Some divisions and product lines within the majors have made real refill progress — L’Oréal’s Kiehl’s refill programme in certain European markets, Aesop’s in-store refills, various premium refill launches. The structural issue is that these sit inside portfolios that overwhelmingly still ship single-use units, so refill remains a marginal share of overall unit volume.

How does Lifelong measure its own environmental impact?

By product design rather than by report. The applicator is designed to last a lifetime and covered by a no-questions-asked replacement guarantee. Only the plant-based refill is replaced, and the refill packaging is fully compostable. Every refill is a plastic tube that never had to be produced. That is a measurable physical fact rather than a five-year commitment.

Is this piece anti-corporate?

No. It is a reporting piece on what was publicly promised versus what was publicly delivered. The individual sustainability teams at the major companies are, in most cases, working hard on genuine problems. The structural issue — that growth-oriented business models conflict with unit-reduction pledges — is not resolved by better people; it is resolved by a different economic model. That model exists in the small independent refill brands. This piece is about reading both scoreboards.