
Ashley Perry is a 12-year-old at Friedman Middle School in Taunton, Massachusetts, who has taken to activism and campaigning at an early age.
As we all know, Kimberly-Clark destroys ancient forests to make tissue-products like Kleenex and Scott tissues. Ashley is running her own Kleercut campaign!
First, she implemented a Perry-family boycott of Kimberly-Clark products. Ashley had read about Greenpeace’s Kleercut campaign on our website, took action, and she was able to persuade her family to follow her lead.
Ashley has taken her campaign on the road as well; she refuses to use Kleenex at her friends’ houses! She has distributed fliers that talk about switching to a more environmentally friendly tissue brand in her neighbors’ mailboxes and handed them out to spectators at the local baseball field about.
At her school, Ashley is a member of the Blue Crew, a group of students who go around twice a week to the classrooms to pick up paper for recycling. In addition to her Kleenex-boycott work, Ashley has, along with her mom’s help, started a recycling program—the Ashley Perry Project—at the local baseball field. Every week Ashley and her mom go retrieve the recyclables and bring them home to put in their own bins. Recently Ashley wrote a letter to her school asking them to place recycling bins in the cafeteria for paper and plastic products. Ashley says the response from her classmates and community members has been positive. “They have been pretty good about recycling and putting it in the right bins,” she says.
Thanks to Ashley for taking the initiative, doing the research and making positive change! It will take all of us to protect the ancient forests!
Keep up the great work, Ashley!
Tissue giant (and forest destroyer) Kimberly-Clark is trying to convince Spanish speakers in the US to buy its products – Huggies and Pull-ups in particular. To do so, they’re touring southern California, handing out sample diapers. If you’re a regular Treehugger blog reader, you know that they’ve had some weird marketing tours in the last year, including an ugly dog-bus and a fake café. This time, it is a diaper-train tent. I’m serious.
On Saturday, Kimberly-Clark advertisers set up in shopping center parking lots in the San Diego area. Everything was going according to plan…until Greenpeace activists showed up again.
The diaper-dealers didn’t realize that Saturday was the start of the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a holiday of Mexican heritage that celebrates those who have passed with a variety of activities – including the building of commemorative altars.
Our team sprang into action, setting up a Day of the Dead altar to honor the animals and ancient forests that have been destroyed for Kimberly-Clark’s throw-away products. The display was complete with Boreal animals, posters of clearcut ancient forests, and placards that explained in Spanish and English: Dedicado a la memoria de los bosques eliminados por KC (In Memory of Forests Destroyed by Kimberly-Clark).
The team also passed out bilingual fliers to hundreds of shoppers, educating them about Kimberly-Clark’s role in ancient forest destruction. The response was enthusiastic. It seems ancient forest destruction stinks no matter how you say it.
The diaper-dealers tried to scare away our activists by threatening to “call Kimberly-Clark” and “take pictures” of them. The activists were delighted by this news, since they’d been working hard to get people to call Kimberly-Clark and had been taking pictures of themselves all afternoon!
Stay tuned as our creative activists turn up the heat on K-C. In the meantime, visit our take action center to use your own creativity to make a statement for ancient forests.
-Rolf
If you watch TV, open a magazine or browse the web these days, you’ve probably seen the phenomenon called “greenwash.” Simply put, greenwash is the act of pretending to be green when you’re not.
An expert greenwasher is Kleenex maker Kimberly-Clark. Responding to pressure from our Kleercut campaign, Kimberly-Clark has made many claims about its environmental performance in recent years. Unfortunately, Kimberly-Clark’s claims have not been matched by commitments and results in the real world.
For example, Kimberly-Clark often claims that the wood fiber they get from Canada’s Boreal Forest are made from “sawdust and chips – or leftovers – of the lumber production process.”
That’s not what see in the Canada’s Boreal Forest. We recently documented a huge pile of wood ripped from the ancient forests in northern Ontario destined to be turned into Kleenex and other disposable products. As you can tell from the photo below, a lot of whole trees -- not "sawdust and chips" -- have been sawed down to feed Kimberly-Clark. Check out the video and full story here.
Kimberly-Clark also claims they are green because they are listed on the Dow Jones World Sustainability Index (DJWSI). Sounds nice, right? The problem is, the DJWSI a tool for measuring a broad range of company characteristics – from “talent attraction and retention” to philanthropy – but it doesn’t have much to do with environmental standards. In fact, only 7% of the overall DJWSI rating has anything to do with the environment, and most of that is focused on energy efficiency. The index does not address the hot-button topics like endangered species or ancient forests. These are core issues that have inspired the campaign against Kimberly-Clark. Oops.
Here’s another one: Kimberly-Clark also claims it is green because it is a member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The Council can be a decent forum to exchange ideas and promote sustainability initiatives. But, there are no real environmental standards required for membership. Basically, any company can join.
In fact, many corporations that are neck-deep in environmental controversies, such as Chevron, General Motors, Royal Dutch Shell, DuPont, Dow Chemical, ConocoPhillips, Weyerhaeuser, and the China Petrochemical Corporation are members of the Council. I’m not trashing the Council, but we can’t let companies like Kimberly-Clark claim their membership in the Council is proof of environmental achievement. That’s like saying you’re in tip-top shape just because you belong to a gym.
The list of greenwashers and greenwashing is long and growing. Greenpeace has a new website dedicated to greenwashing where you can rate and report greenwashing. Check it out here. Together, we can make sure corporations match green words with green deeds!
- Rolf
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