By Lucy Whitehouse, 22-Sep-2015

As an ever-increasing number of countries make moves to end the testing of consumer products on animals, Unilever has partnered up with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop alternative testing strategies.

The partnership states it will work towards ‘groundbreaking’ scientific approaches to uncover testing alternatives, focusing on reducing the large timescales and costs currently attached to available alternative methods.

The Unilever-EPA partnership aims to develop chemical safety testing and risk assessments which are much more relevant to humans than those options presently on the table, meaning Unilever’s strong personal care portfolio, including staple household brands such as Dove and Axe, is set to benefit keenly from the research.

With a long list of countries and regions now rejecting, or gearing up to reject, the use of animals in beauty testing
(including most recently Canada, where a bill to that effect was introduced this summer), companies are increasingly
investing in R&D for alternative methods; the Unilever-EPA alliance confirms this.

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