Kimberly Clark Receives a 2-Ply Confrontation by Greenpeace

Lockdown in Massachusetts

Environmental activists welcomed office workers at Kimberly-Clark’s newest outpost with a protest over the tissue-maker’s limited use of recycled fiber in its products.

Posing as movers, activists entered the office with moving boxes full of recycled toilet and tissue paper and urged the staff to sign a document calling on the company to stop destroying one of North America’s wildest forests to produce disposable products.  When Kimberly-Clark refused to sign a pledge protecting the Boreal forest activists locked down to moving boxes and were eventually arrested by police officers.

Chicago Confrontation

In Chicago, activists locked down to the Johnson Publishing building, only willing to leave if a forest protection pledge is signed by a Kleenex brand board member. Three activists wearing Forest Crime Scene shirts attached themselves to the exterior doors while a “delivery person” entered the building with the pledge.

The event focused on Kimberly-Clark board member Linda Johnson Rice, who sits on the company’s executive committee. Ms. Johnson Rice is also President and Chief Executive Officer of Johnson Publishing Company, Inc. 

The incident is the latest step in an international campaign to force Kimberly-Clark to stop purchasing pulp for its disposable products, including Kleenex, from destructive logging operations in Canada’s Boreal Forest.

Each of the activists were arrested and Ms. Johnson Rice refused to come out of her office to speak with Greenpeace representatives and did not sign the forest protection pledge.  

Forest Destruction

A recent Greenpeace report revealed that Kimberly-Clark devastated Ontario’s Kenogami Forest while promoting itself as a socially responsible environmental leader. The report, “Cut & Run,” uses government information, independent audits, public records, and satellite mapping to document Kimberly-Clark’s management and logging of the Kenogami Forest near Thunder Bay, Ontario. It details how, in just 70 years, the Kenogami Forest has been turned from a vast expanse of healthy, near-pristine forest to a severely damaged landscape rife with social and environmental problems--largely to make products that are used once and then thrown away.

Kimberly-Clark is the largest tissue product company in the world. It manufactures the popular Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle brands of toilet paper and facial tissue. Kimberly-Clark produces million tons of tissue products annually and generates net sales of $18.3 billion.