Unilever, the UK's biggest food producer, is to slash its use of virgin plastics in a bid to stay relevant to young shoppers concerned about the environment.

The consumer goods giant, which owns more than 400 brands including Dove, Comfort, Lipton and PG Tips, has said it will halve the 700,000 tonnes of plastic it uses each year by 2025.

Virgin plastics are produced using raw materials, rather than recycled ones.

The Anglo-Dutch company was trying to appeal to younger consumers who worry about plastic use, chief executive Alan Jope told the BBC.

He said millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995) and Generation Z (largely defined as those born between the mid-1990s and 2010) cared about "purpose and sustainability" and worried about "the conduct of the companies and the brands that they're buying".


He said: "This is part of responding to society but also remaining relevant for years to come in the market. Plastic has its place but that place is not in the environment.

"Our starting point has to be design, reducing the amount of plastic we use, and then making sure that what we do use increasingly comes from recycled sources."

First to be trimmed will be its plastic packaging, which will be cut by more than 100,000 tonnes, Mr Jope told CNBC, adding that he hoped it would encourage "development of the recycled material business system".

The firm's product portfolio will also change, Mr Jope said, as products currently made from brand new plastic will be switched to lighter weight materials that use more recycled plastic.

There will also be more so-called "naked products".

Mr Jope insisted there was "no paradox" between sustainable business and better financial performance.

"We profoundly believe that sustainability leads to a better financial top and bottom line," he said.

Less than a third of the 25 million tonnes of plastic waste collected in Europe every year is recycled, the European Commission has said, while in 2016, less than 3.6 million tonnes of recycled plastics were sold on the continent, barely 8% of the EU market for plastics.