Environmental organization Greenpeace has slammed Dove and Unilever over plastic pollution by targeting the soap maker’s 2022 “toxic influence” ad.
Offering a hard-hitting rebuke of the mega brand and its patent company’s hypocrisy and its harmful effects on women worldwide through a six-minute film that mirrors “Toxic Influence”.
Directed by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Alice Russell, the poignant film opens with the iconic brand symbol, which represents love and peace, dying. Next, a pair of mothers and their daughters are featured speaking positively of Dove before the true, horrific scale of the brand’s plastic waste is revealed – bringing with it a shocked and revolted reaction.
A particularly poignant highlight of Greenpeace’s film is the contrast between Dove’s milk-white background and an image of its widespread plastic pollution.
“I think it is disgraceful that brands can get away with doing this,” one of the two daughters cast in the video remarked, reflecting Greenpeace’s own stance on the subject.
Greenpeace research found that every minute, Dove floods low-income communities with 12,000 highly polluting plastic sachets. These super-polluting packets of plastic are choking our oceans, killing wildlife, and fuelling an environmental disaster of unprecedented scale. The very communities Dove claims to support are drowning in a sea of single-use plastic, their neighbourhoods transformed into unofficial dumping grounds for corporate waste. This needs to change,” the environmental organization wrote.
The film comes a week after Greenpeace activists closed the entrances to parent company Unilever’s headquarters in Central London on 5 September. They reportedly locked themselves onto barricades made to look like giant Dove products, unfurled with the message, “Real beauty isn’t this toxic.”
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Greenpeace’s new film also meaningfully coincides with the 20th anniversary of Dove’s “Real beauty” campaign, which first launched in September 2004.
It has been launched across Greenpeace UK’s YouTube, X, TikTok and Instagram accounts to gain the most visibility and impact.
