Today started as a regular day. My son woke up at 5 am, at 7am I got a coffee, walked to the subway and after a 40 minute commute I got to the office.
But this ain’t no regular day. This is the day Procter&Gamble will have to stop ignoring the voice of the more than 185 thousand people from around the world, which are demanding they stop sourcing palm oil linked to forest destruction and making us all accomplices of the very real threats of extinction faced by Orangutans and Sumatran Tigers in Indonesia.
Just as I opened my computer I found out that Procter & Gamble, in a very sneaky move, started to delete comments placed by our supporters on the social media pages. Let me make this clear. P&G went from ignoring people’s demands to trying to hide them from the world. Busted!
After this poor start, I’m curious to see what they will do about this video we released this morning , highlighting the hypocrisy of a company that claims to support Moms, while making orphans. Orangutan orphans. As if that wasn’t bad enough, by not adopting a serious commitment to No Deforestation, Procter & Gamble is also jeopardizing the future of current and next generations, as deforestation fuels up climate change.
But while videos, posts and other social media materials are a great way of communicating our demands to the company, even if we direct the petitions to the CEO, maybe our calls get filtered before getting to the top decision makers. Those are the big shots that hold the power to change P&G’s policies and guarantee it’s supply chain is free from forest destruction.
No worries, we’ll make sure they hear. As I write, Greenpeace activists are hanging two banners at P&G’s global headquarters in Cincinnati (US). One of them went further and is floating from a zipline that connects both buildings. The messages: “stop putting Tiger’s survival on the line” and “Head&Shoulders, wipes out dandruff and rainforests”. Now let’s see if they can erase that one.
The bottom line of all this is simple. Instead of ignoring the demands from thousands of people and trying to hide the facts, Procter&Gamble needs to address the issue as a serious company. It will only do that when it adopts and implements to a No Deforestation policy that goes beyond their commitment to buying palm oil that, while certified by the RSPO as sustainable, is still linked to the destruction of forests, including Orangutan and Tiger habitat.
