Here’s a press release from Kimberly-Clark, the forest products giant announcing new fiber sourcing standards. Greenpeace has ended its hard-hitting “Kleercut” campaign. No time right now for analysis, but I want to update yesterday’s post with details of the agreement. (The bold highlights are my own.)
Here, too, is a link to a Greenpeace video celebrating the end of the campaign.
And a link to Greenpeace campaigner Scott Paul’s blog where he asks: “Hey Proctor & Gamble (maker of Charmin and Bounty) and Georgia Pacific (maker of Angel Soft and Brawny), you reading this?”
Scott also writes: “Buy me a beer and I’ll bend your ear with some of the most inspirational, innovative, dedicated and downright hysterical things that happened during this campaign… and all staying within our core values of peaceful protest. Marshall McLuhan and the Quakers would be proud.”
Washington, D.C.– Aug. 5, 2009 — Kimberly-Clark Corporation, the maker of Kleenex, Scott and Cottonelle brands, today announced stronger fiber sourcing standards that will increase conservation of forests globally and will make the company a leader for sustainably produced tissue products. Greenpeace, which worked with Kimberly-Clark on its revised standards, announced that it will end its “Kleercut” campaign, which focused on the company and its brands. (more…)
For the last few years, Greenpeace has waged a relentless campaign against Kimberly-Clark, a $19-billion a year forest-products giant whose brands include Kleenex, Huggies, Scott, Pull-Ups and Cottonelle. Greenpeace accused K-C, among other things, of destroying ancient forests in Canada so we can all wipe our noses with Kleenex.
Kimberly-Clark also misled the public about its practices, as I reported back in 2006, citing Greenpeace’s research. (See Are Kleenex Tissues Wiping Out Forests? on Fortune.com.)
Now, it looks as if the antagonists have made peace. Kimberly-Clark and Greenpeace invited reporters to a Washington news conference tomorrow (8-5) and while neither side will talk yet, you can bet that they’ve made a deal.
Knowing Greenpeace as I do (my wife worked there for a couple of years), you can also be confident that K-C has agreed to make significant changes in its practices. Maybe the company will use more recycled stock in tissues? Maybe the company will use more wood that’s certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council? For sure, K-C will agree to take better care of Canada’s Boreal Forest, a focal point of the campaign, which began in 2004. We’ll know soon. [UPDATE: Here's the announcement.]
We already know that this has been a very tough campaign, waged on the Internet, with street protests and at shareholder meetings. (more…)
Whatever you think of the people at Greenpeace, you’ve got to admit they are environmentalists with a sense of humor. Recently, Greenpeace published a scorecard that ranks supermarket chains on the sustainability of their seafood. It’s a serious analysis, intended to guide shoppers to those stores that recognize their responsibility to protect the oceans, and to pressure those stores that don’t. In the argot of activists, this is known as a “name ‘em and shame ‘em” strategy.
Then Greenpeace went a step further. It ridiculed Trader Joe’s, the national supermarket chain with the lowest ranking, by creating a website called Traitor Joe’s (“Your one-stop shop for ocean destruction”), producing an amusing video (below and at www.traitorjoe.com) and sending protesters dressed as Orange Roughy to a Trader Joe’s outlet in San Francisco, calling on the company to clean up its act.
While these tactics might not be well suited for, say, the World Resources Institute, the diversity of the environmental movement is a wonderful thing. Activists at groups like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network or Friends of the Earth function, in essence, as the business development arms of the more collaborative, mainstream groups like the Environmental Defense Fund or Conservation International. Companies under attack from Greenpeace or RAN often ask EDF or CI to help them dig out of trouble.
“I can’t understand,” Al Gore said a while ago, “why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”
Just wait, Al. The Capitol Climate Action, a coalition of activist groups, is organizing what will almost surely be the largest mass civil disobedience for climate in U.S. history. The target: The Capitol Power Plant, a 99-year-old coal-burning plant, situated blocks from Capitol Hill, which heats and cools the U.S. Capitol. (It hasn’t generated electricity since 1952.) Organizers say the plant “symbolizes the stranglehold coal has over our government and future” and the nation’s wrong-headed climate policy. They also say:
As with Ghandi’s walk for independence and Martin Luther King’s march for equal rights, history now calls on people of conscience to peacefully take a principled stand on global warming.
This event could attract thousands of people. It’s endorsed by Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, SDS (who knew they were still around?) and Tikkun. The writer and activist Bill McKibben, poet and activist Wendell Berry and climate scientist James Hansen all plan to attend. Here’s a link to letter from McKibben and Berry, well worth reading, explaining the thinking behind the event.
Now, there are a lot of controversial questions about coal. Can it be made clean? How else will we power the future? Will more expensive, low-carbon fuels create a drag on the economy? But I was amused to stumble upon a different question that’s sparking debate among the young people planning to attend the action: What should one wear to a protest against coal?
You’ve heard of dress for success? This is all about dress for arrest.
The organizers’ website says: “We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you.” This led to a “Strategy Note” on a website called It’s Getting Hot in Here, Dispatches From the Youth Climate Movement, headlined: “Dress to Impress at the Capitol Climate Action” noting that McKibben and Berry had asked participants to dress in their “Sunday best.” Blogger Joshua Kahn Russell included this photo from the civil rights movement:
He wrote:
We understand that we are the inheritors of this spirit and its tone of seriousness and respectability. Throughout the labor movement and various currents for racial justice people have chosen to wear suits as part of their message they send through these bold actions.
Debate ensued. One commenter wrote:
I think encouraging people to dress up is capitulating to established power, as though decision-makers won’t listen to us unless we dress up…. We should dress the way we feel comfortable, not to “impress.” Impress who?
Another shot back:
thinking like yours is exactly why progressive movements don’t get anywhere fast. …It may not be ideal or how you think things should be, but appearances matter, and they matter a lot in this country.
Which led to:
Business suits are part of the dominant/hegemonic cultural symbols of Wall Street.
And finally:
Honestly, shouldn’t we be wearing recycled clothing or something so that we don’t look like a bunch of hypocrites?
You gotta love the left. People can argue about anything.
Seriously, though–I’m excited to see the momentum gathering behind this protest. It could deliver a much-needed sense of urgency and a powerful grass-roots boost to ongoing efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop the construction of conventional coal-fired power plants that contribute to global warming. The issue is certainly generating attention. The business section of today’s New York Times ran an otherwise unremarkable story with the arresting headline, Is America Ready to Quit Coal?. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, NRDC and Environmental Defense have filed lawsuits to block coal plants and lobbied state legislatures and Congress. What’s been missing is grass-roots action.
Here’s an online ad featuring Susan Sarandon, urging people to attend the protest. Protesters are being urged to get training in nonviolent civil disobedience before the event.
I’m planning to cover the March 2 protest. Not sure yet how I’ll be dressed.
(Disclosures: my wife Karen Schneider of Greenpeace helped create the Susan Sarandon video, with The Concept Farm, a New York ad agency. I’m writing and consulting with NRDC and Environmental Defense Fund.)
When I think about the causes of climate change, coal-fired power plants and SUVs come to mind. But refrigerants matter, too. Not the refrigerator in your kitchen–it’s unlikely to be emitting greenhouse gases–but the chemical refrigeratants known as HFCs and HCFCs in your car’s air conditioner, commercial coolers and industrial freezers can all escape and cause problems, particularly when they are manufactured or improperly thrown away.
This is one of those important, complicated, technical and potentially dull stories that I try to tackle from time to time, in this case in today’s Sustainability column. The issue got my attention when Ben & Jerry’s and Greenpeace announced that they were able to get permission from the U.S. EPA to introduce what they call a “cleaner, greener” refrigerator into the U.S. (Turns out EPA was an obstacle to cleaning up the refrigerator biz.) Some other big companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have been working on the problem, too. Let’s hope they succeed so the rest of us don’t have to worry about it.
Here’s how the column begins:
No one wants melting ice cream. Nor do we want melting polar ice caps. The trouble is, keeping our ice cream cold warms the planet because powerful greenhouse gases are used in most refrigerators and freezers in the U.S.
That’s why environmentalists at Greenpeace have been working with some of the world’s biggest food makers – among them Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Unilever – to deploy refrigerators in supermarkets and convenience stores that are free of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases.
Just last month, Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker owned by Unilever, announced plans to roll out the country’s first HFC-free freezers.
“A company can be responsible in terms of the environment, it can be proactive in terms of solving problems, and it can make money at the same time,” said company co-founder Ben Cohen when he introduced the freezers at an ice-cream store in Washington, D.C. “That’s what we should expect from all corporations in this country.”
