Key indicators – people and sustainability

Unilever has for many years recognised the significance of social and environmental issues as a critical dimension of its operations, and has established many indicators to track its performance in these areas.

We regard safety as an essential element of a successful and sustainable business and take seriously our responsibility to provide a safe workplace. We aim to improve continuously the health, safety and well-being of everyone working for or on behalf of Unilever to a standard on a par with the very best of our peers. A key measure of our progress in this area is our total recordable accident frequency rate which counts all workplace accidents except those requiring only simple first aid treatment. In 2007 this decreased to 0.26 accidents per 100 000 hours worked, declining from 0.46 in 2004.

We are committed to meeting the needs of customers and consumers in an environmentally sound and sustainable manner, through continuous improvement in environmental performance in all our activities. We exercise the same concern for the environment wherever we operate and aim to reduce the environmental footprint of our business and brands. The environmental measures that we regard as the most significant in relation to our business are those relating to the amounts of CO₂ from energy that we produce, the water that we consume as part of our production processes, and the amount of waste that we generate. We continue to improve our performance across these measures, having reduced our CO₂ emissions from energy by 33.5%, our water use by 58.6% and our total waste by 69.3% per tonne of production over the period 1995 – 2006. In 2007 we set ourselves the further goal of achieving a 25% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2012 (from a 2004 baseline), to give a total reduction of around 43% since 1995.

The table below shows the results for these indicators for the last three years for which independently assured (performed by firms other than Unilever's external auditors) data are available:

The type of assurance undertaken has been limited to enquiries of company personnel and analytical procedures together with review on a sample basis of the operation of processes relating to performance data noted in the table above. Assurance of this nature is substantially less in scope than a financial audit and does not include detailed sample testing of source data, processes or internal controls.

A comprehensive review of Unilever's social and environmental performance can be found in our annual Sustainable Development Report, available online at www.unilever.com Published in May 2008, our next Report will contain updated and independently assured results for 2007 for the measures above, as well as trend information that demonstrates our consistent performance over the longer term.

Please refer also to the Corporate responsibility and sustainability section which highlights a number of key issues and activities in this area in 2007. Our Operating Review also gives examples of the ways in which our brands are addressing consumers' social and environmental concerns.

Ten-year trends in many of the measures described above, together with a range of other indicators, are included in the document 'Unilever Charts' which can be found on our website at www.unilever.com/ourcompany/investorcentre/annual_reports