Liar, Liar, Forests on Fire

In the span of just one year, two of Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) top pulp suppliers sourced close to five million cubic meters of wood from sensitive forests. That’s the equivalent of 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of forest being cut down.¹ Imagine destroying a whole biome just to produce “Ultra Soft” Charmin! Cleaning up bums, and wiping out the forest.

A new report by NRDC paints a damning image of P&G’s complicity in the degradation of one of the last remaining intact forests in the world – the boreal. Despite P&G’s environmental lip service, the company still refuses to avoid irresponsible suppliers whose large-scale logging in the boreal is not sustainable or ethical. Both of the top suppliers analyzed in the exposé do not adhere to getting Free, Prior, and Informed Consent from the Indigenous communities whose lands they’re ravaging.

P&G is misleading us all by failing to address its impacts on primary forests and threatened species’ habitats. That’s why we’re asking you to send an email to P&G leadership about it using our easy tool.

P&G must commit to not source from sensitive ecosystems like the boreal in order to end its role in destroying climate-critical forests. This starts with P&G and its tissue brands like Charmin putting it down in writing in their upcoming forestry policy.

But we know P&G and Charmin’s powerful PR team will spin these facts into greenwashing commitments if we don’t sound the alarm. Defending forests is in our DNA, back from when we were founded more than 20 years ago as ForestEthics. Over the years we’ve been proud to help protect millions of acres from logging in the Great Bear Rainforest, Northern boreal forest, and in Chile. Now, over 51,000 Stand members have signed our petition asking this mega-corporation to do more to protect forests.

But it’s time to escalate the pressure even more. Stand.earth members have already started sending emails to encourage P&G’s leadership to cut ties with shady pulp suppliers, and we’re asking you to do the same so that we can avoid this crisis.

We need to act fast to get this information to the desks of Charmin brand directors and P&G executives so they can prioritize intact forest protection in their yet-to-be-released forestry policy. It’s time to stand up to P&G and start cleaning up its skid marks – before things get too dirty.

Our fight for the forests and natural ecosystems seems impossible and never-ending – but with your help we’ve put a stop to countless efforts to destroy natural resources in the name of profit. Thank you for always standing with us in this fight. We couldn’t do it without you.

¹By a Thousand Cuts: How Powerful Companies’ Wood Sourcing Is Degrading Canada’s Boreal Forest.