Forest Footprint Disclosure (FFD), which asks international companies to reveal their impact on forests around the world, has released their second review. From biofuels to travel to media, FFD named corporate leaders in 19 categories, including Kimberly Clark for Personal-Household products and Nike for Clothing, Accessories and Footwear.
“Kimberly-Clark has been integrating sustainability into all aspects of our business—from the design and manufacture of our products, to serving the communities where we operate and sell our portfolio of essential products,” Suhas Apte, Kimberly-Clark’s VP of Global Sustainability said in the press release.
Kimberly-Clark is the first big tissue company to require wood suppliers to have independent certification and have shown preference for paper products with Forest Stewardship Certification (FSC). The company also funds efforts to map high conservation value forests in Brazil and Indonesia, the countries with the two largest deforestation rates.
For its part Nike is working to avoid purchasing any leather from cattle grown on newly deforested areas. In Brazilian Amazon, cattle are the largest cause of deforestation.
 The Brazilian Amazon meets encroaching agriculture. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. |
Reaching out to 285 companies, FFD received responses from 78 an improvement from their first report by 31%. The organization has called on more companies to come forward on their impact on forests.
“It’s not just environmental good sense, it makes increasingly sound business sense to understand and reduce deforestation pressures driven by agricultural expansion right now—to prepare for both future legislation and market opportunities,” said Tracey Campbell, Director of the FFD Project.
FFD hopes that its initiative saves forests on the ground by increasing corporate transparency. They challenge companies to identify which commodities lead to deforestation, purchase only sustainably-certified products, and map their supply chain.
“190 Governments have now recognized halting deforestation is a key world priority—businesses should do the same. Engaging with Forest Footprint Disclosure is one small step through which companies can make sure their supply chain choices are not destroying the natural capital on which their future wealth creation depends,” Andrew Mitchell, Chairman of FFD, said.
This year’s leaders include Stora Enso Oyj (Basic Materials), Greenergy International (Biofuels), Adidas and Nick (Clothing, Accessories, and Footwear), IOI Group (Farming and Fishing), Carrefour and J Sainsbury (Food and Drug Retailer), Marks and Spencer (General Retailer), Dalhoff, Larsen and Horneman and Weyerhaeuser (Industrials and Autos), Reed Elsevier (Media), Nestle Oil (Oil and Gas), Kimberly-Clark (Personal and Household), BBritish Airways (Travel and Leisure), and Drax Group (Utilities).
Related articles
Greening the world with palm oil?
(01/26/2011) The commercial shows a typical office setting. A worker sits drearily at a desk, shredding papers and watching minutes tick by on the clock. When his break comes, he takes out a Nestle KitKat bar. As he tears into the package, the viewer, but not the office worker, notices something is amiss—what should be chocolate has been replaced by the dark hairy finger of an orangutan. With the jarring crunch of teeth breaking through bone, the worker bites into the “bar.” Drops of blood fall on the keyboard and run down his face. His officemates stare, horrified. The advertisement cuts to a solitary tree standing amid a deforested landscape. A chainsaw whines. The message: Palm oil—an ingredient in many Nestle products—is killing orangutans by destroying their habitat, the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra.
Does chopping down rainforests for pulp and paper help alleviate poverty in Indonesia?
(01/13/2011) Over the past several years, Asia Pulp & Paper has engaged in a marketing campaign to represent its operations in Sumatra as socially and environmentally sustainable. APP and its agents maintain that industrial pulp and paper production — as practiced in Sumatra — does not result in deforestation, is carbon neutral, helps protect wildlife, and alleviates poverty. While a series of analyses and reports have shown most of these assertions to be false, the final claim has largely not been contested. But is conversion of lowland rainforests for pulp and paper really in Indonesia’s best economic interest?
Emissions from deforestation slow
(12/15/2010) A dip in forest clearing in Brazil combined with rising levels of industrial emissions have reduced the share of carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation to around 9 percent, according to research published last month in Nature Geoscience.
Credits
