Santa arrested for delivering coal to Procter & Gamble headquarters in Ohio

December 5, 2019

Saint Nick takes surprise sleigh ride from North Pole to Cincinnati to call out Charmin executives for destroying the Canadian boreal forest — home of Rudolph — to make toilet paper

CINCINNATI, OHIO — Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus took a surprise sleigh ride from the North Pole to Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday to visit Procter & Gamble’s headquarters, where they let company executives know they were #1 on Santa’s Naughty List for destroying endangered forests like the Boreal Forest in Canada — home of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — to make Charmin toilet paper.

See photos and video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MFMZG-CyOxdZNQ9fEvh4W1luqOHlaG1z?usp=sharing 

Dressed as elves, reindeer, and carolers, activists with environmental organization Stand.earth accompanied Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus on their visit. The holiday soiree paraded around the block with burlap bags filled with coal, ending in front of Procter & Gamble’s headquarters, where they sang TP-themed Christmas carols and delivered the quintessential Naughty List gift: 100 pounds of coal. (Unfortunately, no chimney could be found to access the building.) 

To the tune of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”, the carolers sang: “You better watch out, you better not cry, the reindeer have lost their home, and here’s why: Charmin cuts the forest down. They’re cutting down trees, grinding them up, destroying reindeer homes, so you can wipe your butt. Charmin cuts the forest down.”

Police arrested Santa about an hour after he arrived, for refusing to leave unless Charmin executives came out to accept their bad tidings. As he was whisked away in handcuffs, Santa could be heard “Ho, Ho, Ho-ing” tearfully as he lamented Procter & Gamble’s policy of refusing to use recycled content in its Charmin toilet paper, relying instead on fiber from fresh-cut trees from endangered forests like the Boreal Forest in Canada —  critical habitat for caribou, which are also called reindeer.

“We’re here today to send Procter & Gamble’s executives a message: All we want for Christmas is for you to stop making Charmin toilet paper from endangered forests like the Boreal. Reindeer are disappearing because you are destroying their home, when you could easily make your products from recycled or alternative fiber instead. Procter & Gamble: Save Santa’s reindeer from Charmin toilet paper!” said Tegan Hansen, Canadian Forest Campaigner at Stand.earth.

The Boreal Forest is the largest intact forest in the world. Protecting it is a global priority because it stores more carbon per acre than just about any forest type on Earth, which means it is vital to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change. Often called the “Amazon of the North”, the Boreal is home to over 600 Indigenous communities, as well as boreal caribou, pine marten, and billions of songbirds. The loss of this intact forest is impacting Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life and driving the decline of caribou and other species.

BACKGROUND

In February 2019, Stand.earth and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the Issue with Tissue report, taking the largest U.S. companies to task for exacerbating the climate crisis with their toilet paper and tissue products.The report gave Charmin a failing grade.

In October 2019, protesters rallied outside P&G’s annual shareholder meeting to call attention to P&G’s failure to address its role in climate change, after months of behind the scenes negotiations failed because P&G refused to adopt clear commitments with timelines, actual goals, and clear steps to get out of endangered forests and threatened caribou habitat.

NEW REPORT ON CANADA LOGGING

Canada proudly touts its forestry practices as some of the most sustainable on the planet, saying logging in Canada leads to virtually no deforestation. But a new report, Boreal Logging Scars: An extensive and persistent logging footprint in typical clearcuts of northwestern Ontario, Canada, released Wednesday, December 4, 2019 by the Canadian organization Wildlands League shows this claim isn’t true. The report paints a vivid picture of the long-term effects of clearcut logging in Canada’s boreal forest, using aerial photographs to prove visually that deforestation is not only widespread in the boreal, but is also wildly underestimated by Canada’s federal and provincial governments. The report found that in Ontario alone, deforestation rates from clearcut logging are fifty times higher than provincial estimates, and seven times greater than the estimated total for all of Canada.

Because the Canadian government claims that only 0.02% of Canadian forestry results in deforestation, companies that purchase boreal wood products from Canada have been led to believe that Canadian forestry practices are sustainable and deforestation-free. This myth further incentivizes companies that have committed not to contribute to deforestation through their supply chain to choose Canada for their wood fiber needs. 

Procter & Gamble buys pulp from Canada’s boreal forest for its tissue products and touts the Canadian government’s claims about forest replanting and regrowth as justification for its sourcing, even as the company is committed to not contributing to deforestation in its supply chain for other commodities. P&G sources significant amounts of its pulp for Charmin and its other tissue products from the region evaluated in this report and the surrounding areas. This raises questions regarding the practices of those logging companies from which P&G purchases its pulp, and creates urgency for the company to reexamine and revise its sourcing policies, which NRDC and Stand.earth have been calling on them to do for more than a year.

Read more in a blog by NRDC: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/shelley-vinyard/canadian-boreal-wood-buyers-youve-been-had-finds-report

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Media contacts: 

Virginia Cleaveland, Communications Manager, virginia@stand.earth 510-858-9902 (US)
Tegan Hansen, Forest Campaigner, tegan@stand.earth, 250-354-3302 (Canada)