Plastic
Commitments

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our packaging. For example, the plastic bottle of the NIVEA Sun Kids Protect & Care sun milk is made of 95% recycled material, while the cap and spray head are made of 50% and 30% recycled plastic, respectively.

These changes help to reduce the use of newly produced plastic – while maintaining the quality that you expect from NIVEA Sun products.

Increasing the use of recycled material is one way we work to reduce the need for virgin plastic in our packaging. By incorporating recycled material into our bottles and other packaging components, we help keep valuable materials in use for longer.

Depending on the type of plastic used, such as PET, PE or PP, increasing the share of recycled material can be technically challenging due to the limited availability of high-quality recycled plastic. At the same time, making sure the safety and quality of our skincare products remains a priority for you and your family.

We are increasing the use of recycled material in our packaging. By the end of 2025, recycled plastic accounted for 30% of the plastic used in our packaging globally. Thanks to the use of recycled material, around 19,000 tons of virgin plastic were avoided in 2025.

Many of our products indicate the share of recycled plastic used in the packaging. In some cases, the packaging is not yet made from 100% recycled plastic. For example, to achieve the distinctive NIVEA bottle colour, a combination of colour pigments and virgin plastic is currently still required. We believe in being transparent about our progress and openly communicating where further improvements are still needed.

Whether packaging can be recycled depends on the local recycling infrastructure. So, check with your local waste disposal provider about how you can best contribute to the recycling of packaging.

At NIVEA, we carefully evaluate each product packaging together with an external institute to find out how much of the packaging’s material can already be detected, sorted and recycled in practice and at scale. Sometimes the changes we need to make to increase recyclability are small, but impactful. A case in point: the NIVEA Micellar facial cleansing range – here, we removed the silver foil that was previously used on the back label.

Another example of an action we took to increase the recyclability of our packaging was to use new colour pigments in our black packaging. Previously, black plastic packaging was often not detected during the automated sorting process in recycling plants and was therefore incinerated. The newly developed colour particles are correctly detected by today’s sorting technology and directed accordingly for recycling. Since 2020, we only use these new colour pigments in our NIVEA Micellar Expert range as well as for the NIVEA MEN DEEP shampoos and shower gels.