Unilever is spinning off its food unit and merging it with U.S. spice giant McCormick in a $65 billion deal announced in March 2026, creating one of the largest food companies in the world. The combined entity will own brands like Hellmann's mayonnaise and Cholula hot sauce, and will be managed under McCormick's oversight, which will be taking on a business nearly twice its current size.

The deal itself isn't the story. What happened on May 8 is.

A group of major institutional investors, including Norwegian asset manager Storebrand, a top-100 Unilever shareholder, and Frankfurt-based Union Investment, a top-40 investor in both companies, publicly stated they intend to demand ESG commitments from the new entity before and after the transaction closes. Their core concern: deforestation. Unilever has maintained explicit no-deforestation sourcing standards with full traceability requirements to individual plantations. McCormick has not. Sustainalytics, an ESG ratings firm, classifies McCormick as "medium-risk" on sustainability, noting its report does not include a company-wide no-deforestation commitment and provides less detail on traceability, auditing, and certification.

The investors are not asking the new company to start a sustainability program. They are asking not to abandon one that already exists.

M&A transactions routinely carry financial due diligence. Environmental and social performance is still treated, in most boardrooms, as a separate concern, evaluated after valuation and synergies. This deal is a live test of whether that separation holds.

The mechanism investors are counting on is structural: Unilever will hold a 10% stake and board seats in the combined entity, which creates a formal channel to push the ESG agenda forward. That's not a handshake commitment. It's leverage built into the deal architecture.

But the gap is real. McCormick will take on oversight of a business nearly twice its current size, with a more complex global supply chain that brings fresh challenges linked to agriculture, commodities, and small-scale farming. Scaling sustainability performance at that speed requires infrastructure: data systems, supplier audits, certification programs, and traceability protocols. None of that is standard equipment in most food supply chains.

There's also a precedent that investors are watching. When Kellanova separated from Kellogg in 2023, it dropped its pesticide commitments and other sustainability goals. Corporate restructurings have a documented pattern of diluting environmental commitments. The Unilever-McCormick deal is large enough, and the investor pressure is public enough, that the outcome will likely become a reference case for how ESG performance is treated in large-scale M&A.

For industries that depend on certified commodities, including construction, where materials certification and supply chain traceability are becoming prerequisites for LEED, EDGE, and EPD compliance, this is not a distant financial story. The same logic applies: sustainability commitments built over years can disappear in a restructuring if they are not embedded in governance, not just in policy documents.

The question is not whether a company has a sustainability program. The question is whether the program survives a change in ownership.

Most professionals in sustainable construction piece together their education as they go - one course here, one certification there, no clear path connecting them.

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Eight schools covering the full scope of the field: sustainable architecture, interiors, biophilic design, ESG, water efficiency, sustainable materials, green certifications - including LEED Green Associate - and AI for architecture. Each with video modules, simulation tools, and a certificate upon completion.

The learning path above shows the structure: start with the UGREEN Certification, select your area of focus, and follow a curriculum that goes from foundational knowledge to applied implementation.

The construction industry extracts, uses, and discards. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, between 20% and 30% of construction waste is recycled. From demolitions, only 1% of materials are reused. Cement alone accounts for roughly 8% of global CO₂ emissions.

That volume of waste has a direct cost: more extraction, more production, more emissions. Circular materiality addresses this through a different logic of specification. Material selection begins to account for what a material does across the structure's entire service life: how much carbon it generates in production, how long it lasts without intervention, and what remains when the building reaches the end. Two materials put this logic into practice in different ways.

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is the fastest-growing segment within wood construction. The global market was estimated at USD 1.84 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at 15.15% per year through 2033. The growth has both technical and regulatory foundations: climate policies in Europe, the United States, and Canada now require the accounting of embodied carbon in buildings, and engineered wood holds a strong position in that calculation.

The environmental advantage comes from the material's composition. Wood is approximately 50% carbon by weight. When it becomes a structure, that carbon stays locked in for the building's service life. Systematic life cycle assessment reviews indicate that replacing reinforced concrete with mass timber reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 40% to 43% on average. Compared to steel, the reduction can reach 50%.

The material can be used in floors, beams, columns, and walls, in buildings up to 40 stories. Components arrive on site pre-cut with joints and openings already machined, which reduces construction waste and shortens build time.

One critical point for specification: wood only holds up as an environmental argument when origin traceability is verifiable. FSC or PEFC certification has shifted from a differentiator to a baseline requirement in public contracts and projects pursuing certifications such as LEED, BREEAM, or EDGE. Without traceable sourcing, the environmental claim does not stand.

Bioconcrete was developed by Dutch microbiologist Henk Jonkers at Delft University of Technology. The material incorporates colonies of the bacterium Bacillus pseudofirmus into the concrete mix. When water enters a crack, the bacteria produce calcite crystals that seal the fracture before it propagates. The bacteria survive for more than 200 years inside the structure.

The first real-scale application was a lifeguard station in the Netherlands in 2011. The material is still transitioning from laboratory to market, but early commercial applications already exist.

The upfront cost is 40% higher than conventional concrete. The cost over the service life tells a different story. Life cycle studies show that a conventionally cracked reinforced concrete slab in a marine environment lasts around 7 years before requiring repair. The equivalent bioconcrete slab lasts between 60 and 94 years, with a 56% to 75% reduction across multiple environmental impact indicators. For infrastructure projects, coastal construction, hospitals, and any building where structural maintenance interruption carries a high operational cost, that difference changes the viability of the project.

Engineered wood and bioconcrete come from different origins and apply to different contexts. What they share is their relationship to the material cycle: one reduces the amount of virgin material required by using renewable, traceable sourcing; the other extends the life of the structure and reduces how often it needs to be rebuilt.

The circular economy materials market in construction in the United States exceeded USD 9.1 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at 11.7% per year through 2034. A significant share of that growth is being driven by developers and contractors that need to document the carbon footprint of their projects to meet ESG targets. Climate policies in the European Union are pushing in the same direction, with embodied carbon requirements now embedded in several national building codes. The pressure is structural, and the market for materials that can answer it is growing accordingly.

71% of Brazilian companies say they have adopted sustainable practices, but only 20% publish verifiable data. This does not point to bad faith on the part of these companies. The problem is that the infrastructure itself cannot support what the discourse promises.

The goal is not the problem. The system that is supposed to execute it is.

Copying the European sustainability model in a country that lacks the infrastructure it requires is an operational risk.

Watch the full video on YouTube and see why so many sustainability strategies fall apart before they leave the planning stage, and what companies can actually control within this reality.

Disclaimer: The video is in Brazilian Portuguese, but simultaneous translation and subtitles are available in multiple languages.