We discuss the possibility to implement a viscous cosmological model, attributing to the dark matter component a behaviour described by bulk viscosity. Since bulk viscosity implies negative pressure, this rises the possibility to unify the dark sector. At the same time, the presence of dissipative effects may alleviate the so called small scale problems in the $Lambda$CDM model. While the unified viscous description for the dark sector does not lead to consistent results, the non-linear behaviour indeed improves the situation with respect to the standard cosmological model.