“We’ve done it before, we can do it here.”
It’s a mantra that we have been saying over and over again in our campaign to protect the Boreal Forest.
We can put in place lasting solutions that protect the forest and the wildlife that depend on it, that keep wood flowing to saw mills and pulp and paper operations, that retain and enhance jobs and job security, and respect the rights and interests of First Nations communities.
We’ve done it in Canada in the Great Bear Rainforest. We’ve done it in Indonesia. We are doing it in Brazil.
But why does Canada's largest logging company, Resolute Forest Products, say it can’t be done here? Why does Resolute say they can never collaborate with Greenpeace?
It’s almost funny. We work with big logging companies like Interfor and Western Forest Products. In the 90s, we ran pretty high profile campaigns against these two companies. But despite this, they never said they couldn’t work with us. And the proof is that we have been partnered with them in the Joint Solutions Project for more than a decade, where we have been very successful in finding and implementing fair solutions to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest and maintain a forestry based economy. 
One of other companies we work with under the Joint Solutions Project is Catalyst Paper - which is funny because the current CEO of Resolute Forest Products, Richard Garneau, is the former CEO of Catalyst Paper. Collaborating with us in the Great Bear Rainforest and but not here and now? What’s different?
One of the really interesting partnerships that we have is with Kimberly-Clark. They are the world’s largest tissue product manufacturer – a $40 billion dollar company – and maker of Kleenex tissue products. A billion people a day use their products.
From 2004 to August 2009 we ran a very high profile global campaign against Kimberly-Clark. It was called the Kleercut campaign, and it involved a lot of spoofing of their leading brand. The campaign, which you can read more about here (check out the timeline) involved blockades of their factories and mills, video and photo exposes of the logging operations where they purchased their wood pulp from, damning reports, shareholder resolutions, protests on campuses and the workplaces of their board members, and lots and lots of major corporate customers educated about Kimberly-Clark’s destructive ways.
Lots of controversy, lots of headlines. 
It was a pretty intense campaign and a bunch of influential people told me: “You’ll never move these guys, they are too big and too set in their ways.”
But we stuck with it, and Kimberly-Clark came around in a major way.
In 2009, after several months of negotiations, they announced and began implementation of one of the most progressive environmental paper policies in the world. In the last five years, they’ve transformed their supply chain, disassociating themselves from destructive logging operations, ramping up the use of FSC-certified pulp, launching new greener products, and even exploring and selling tissue products that containing alternative materials like bamboo. They recently committed to reduce their use of pulp from natural forests by 50%.
This isn’t some niche company, selling hemp toilet paper out of a home office (no offense to those that do this). This is one of the biggest consumer products companies on the planet. And since 2009 we have worked closely with them on the implementation of their policy. We didn’t just go away after the campaign ended, we further engaged with the company to do right by forests and right by them, knowing that there was a big impact to be made, for good. 
Change can happen in the forest. If we can do it with Kimberly-Clark, in the Great Bear Rainforest, in South East Asia and Brazil, with Mattel and Nestle, we can do it here in the Boreal Forest in Canada.
Hopefully one day, Resolute will take a different approach. We’ll be here when they do.
Help us by taking action at www.standforforests.ca
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