August 28th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

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%.

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