Kimberly-Clark, the world’s largest personal paper products company, announced new policies today in which the paper maker will greatly increase the use of recycled and sustainably grown wood fibers in its products, which include the Kleenex, Scott and Cottonelle brands.

The move will help save forests around the globe and make the Dallas-based company a leader in producing sustainable paper products, said Greenpeace media officer Daniel Kessler. “We worked with Kimberly-Clark on this policy and it’s a landmark for forest protection; 100 percent of Kimberly-Clark’s fiber will come from sustainable sources.”

For five years, Greenpeace had pressured Kimberly-Clark to become more environmentally sensitive about the raw material used for its paper products. Greenpeace’s “Kleercut” campaign protested Kimberly-Clark’s use of virgin wood fiber in Kleenex tissues, organizing blockades and demonstrations and arguing that the company’s use of trees from Canada’s Boreal Forest and other virgin sources was contributing to world-wide deforestation.

The new fiber-sourcing policies announced Wednesday bring the long-running Kleercut campaign to an end and make public Kimberly-Clark’s plans for more sustainable business practices.

Over the next three years, Kimberly-Clark will dramatically adjust its sourcing for disposable paper products, aiming to ultimately get all of its fiber from sustainable sources. By the end 2011, the global paper product maker has promised that 40 percent of its North American tissue fiber – representing an estimated 600,000 tons – will be either recycled or certified as sustainably grown by the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC). That represents an increase of more than 70 percent over 2007 levels.

“We are committed to using environmentally responsible wood fiber and today’s announcement enhances our industry-leading practices in this area,” said Suhas Apte, Kimberly-Clark Vice President of Environment, Energy, Safety, Quality and Sustainability, in a news release.

“It is our belief that certified primary wood fiber and recycled fiber can both be used in an environmentally responsible way and can provide the product performance that customers and consumers expect from our well-known tissue brands. We commend Greenpeace for helping us develop more sustainable standards.”

Paper companies, including Kimberly-Clark, have long argued that consumers prize softness in tissues and toilet paper, which the companies used to justify their use of virgin wood fibers for disposable personal care products.

But consumer tastes and desires are changing, and the focus on softness may be lessening as people become more aware of environmental degradation associated with common household products.

“Consumers vote with their dollars. We know that as consumers become increasingly concerned with supporting environmentally friendly products, they increase pressure on companies to do the right thing,” Kessler said, noting that an estimated 20 percent of global greenhouse gases come from deforestation.

The temperate Boreal Forest, like the tropical rainforests in the Southern Hemisphere, is a huge carbon sink, holding in the ground carbon that adds to the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels when released. Environmentalists from Greenpeace to Prince Charles of Great Britain are passionately trying to save the forests to mitigate global warming.

Under the new agreement, Kimberly-Clark will not purchase of any fiber from the Canadian Boreal Forest that is not FSC certified by 2011, helping preserve the forest as well as endangered animals that depend upon it.

“Today, ancient forests like the Boreal Forest have won,” said Richard Brooks, Greenpeace Canada Forest Campaign Coordinator in the news release. “This new relationship between Kimberly-Clark and Greenpeace will promote forest conservation, responsible forest management, and recycled fiber as far and wide as possible.”

Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark employs 53,000 people around the world, and posted sales of $19.4 billion in 2008, according to company statements. It makes products under the Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex and Depends brands.

Greenpeace has posted a web page where consumers can thank Kimberly-Clark for this move toward more sustainable practices.

Kimberly-Clark also has other sustainability initiatives.

(Image credit: Greenpeace.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Greenpeace, guardian of oceans and forests, has reissued its Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide to help people make the switch to recycled paper.

The newly updated pocket guide endorses brands such as Green Forest, Earth Friendly, Natural Value and Seventh Generation, which are made of recycled paper.

It recommends that shoppers avoid products such as Kleenex, Cottonelle, Charmin, Angel Soft, Bounty, Brawny and the Target and Wal-Mart house brands because they are not made from recycled wood products.

Using recycled personal paper products can make an impressive impact in curbing global warming, according to Greenpeace, among others — far greater than one might suspect from contemplating the lowly roll of toilet paper.

Greenpeace reports that Americans could save 400,000 trees if every family replaced just one regular roll of TP with a recycled one. Imagine if more people switched over completely to recycled brands. Untold acres of carbon-absorbing, life-sustaining forests could be saved.

Even if Greenpeace’s calculations are off-the-mark, consumers could still wield impressive sway in saving forests by ditching conventional paper products.

Mainstream paper companies have responded to deforestation concerns by turning to wood from sustainably managed forests, which require them to harvest according to guidelines that preserve the forest and provide for replanting.

Advocates, though, worry that even these sustainable practices still winnow trees for throwaway paper products.

Greenpeace’s position is that paper companies should get their wood fibers from post-consumer wood or paper waste, or failing that, from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forests and tree farms. Companies should not use wood from old-growth forests, a practice that’s slowing, but has not stopped.

For its guide, Greenpeace eschewed paper products that were made from virgin wood fibers, and gave improved rankings based on how much of the product came from post-consumer waste. It also looked at whether the paper was bleached using chlorine, a process that pollutes groundwater, lakes and streams. It suggested that consumers look for products that are made of 100 percent overall recycled content, a minimum of which is 50 percent post-consumer recycled content.

It’s an attainable goal: Green Forest, the top TP pick, is made from 100 percent recycled fibers, 90 percent of which are post-consumer waste, meaning this paper is truly on its second incarnation. By contrast, several TPs in the “avoid” category contain no recycled or post-consumer content. In other words, they might be Angel Soft, but they’re not green.

For a movie that explicitly addresses the perils of overconsumption, Pixar’s WALL*E is being used to promote an awful lot of consumer products.

One tie-in in particular is rankling Greenpeace. It seems that the lovable robot’s image has popped up on boxes of Kleenex, a product the activist group has criticized with a “Kleercut” campaign that asserts, “it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex” because the product’s manufacturer Kimberly-Clark “all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products.” (Among other things, they’re trying to get parents and teachers to reject the company’s tissues in classrooms.)

Seeing a wealth of irony (or, as the activist group puts it, “Iron*E”) in the promotion, Greenpeace commissioned political cartoonist Mark Fiore to make his own cartoon parable. The result falls far short of Pixar quality in terms of wit and charm, but it gets the message across: The cute ‘bot meets a new character named Kleer*E, whose chainsaw arms and ferocious jaws are used to turn forests into tissue boxes; his theme song offers bits of hyperbole like “You blow your snotty nose, another tree goes down…”

Requests for comment from Kimberly-Clark went unanswered. At the FAQ on the Kleenex site, the company defends itself by insisting, “Virgin fiber is used in our tissue because it provides the superior softness consumers expect from a premium facial tissue product such as Kleenex® facial tissue.” At the corporate web site, a large Sustainability Report plays up the introduction of a “Naturals” line of products (some of which is carried by Wal-Mart at last check) including facial tissues with 20% recycled fiber, bathroom tissue with 40%, and paper towels with 80%.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media