Another victory for Greenpeace - Mattel instructs its suppliers to stop sourcing pulp from APP!

Environmental Leader reported earlier today that "Mattel has pledged to create a sustainable procurement policy and directed suppliers to put a freeze on purchases from Asia Pulp & Paper, following Greenpeace protests over the origin of its packaging."

Mattel wrote on its Facebook page: "We know deforestation is an important issue. It is to us as well. Today we announced the development of a Sustainable Procurement Policy for all of Mattel’s product lines. This policy will require packaging suppliers to commit to sustainable forestry management practices."

Mattel also referred on this page directly to APP:

"Today Mattel launched an investigation into deforestation allegations. While Mattel does not contract directly with Sinar Mas/APP, we have directed our packaging suppliers to stop sourcing pulp from them as we investigate the allegations."

This announcement added Mattel to a growing list of companies that stopped making business with APP, either directly or indirectly following Greenpeace campaigns against APP in the past. These companies include Carrefour , Tesco, Kraft, Nestlé and Unilever. When I asked Ian Lifshitz, Sustainability & Public Outreach Manager at APP, about it in an interview we conducted with him last year, he replied:

APP is a brand umbrella for paper products manufactured by several pulp and paper companies in Indonesia and China. APP operates independently from PT. SMART Tbk's palm oil with different entities, management and shareholders.

Despite the circulating rumours started by the GP report, overall volume of APP products to customers has not been impacted upon. Most our associates know that these rumours are unfounded.

Greenpeace by the way doesn't see in Mattel's announcement the end of story - they wrote on their blog that "Mattel’s latest statement, released on Friday in the US, suggests that the company now recognises it has a deforestation problem. However, it isn’t out of the woods yet and the company must provide more details and clear timelines to show that they are serious about dealing with these issues."

APP's response? According to Environmental Leader, APP responded to the Greenpeace allegations, saying in part, “Greenpeace’s allegation that it found mixed tropical hardwood fibers in some products that we might have produced is meaningless. Indonesia’s pulpwood land concessions, legally provided by the Government of Indonesia, include some degraded forests, which are required by law to be developed into plantations…"

We'll keep you posted with any further developments in this story.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Planting trees for your books!

Why Amazon rejected a shareholder decision to disclose how it deals with climate change?

Last Tuesday Amazon's shareholders rejected on their annual meeting a resolution calling the company to prepare and publish a report describing how Amazon.com is assessing the impact of climate change on the corporation.

This resolution was This resolution was filed by Calvert Investments, one of the largest sustainable and responsible investment companies in the U.S. and we also helped in the preparation of this resolution.

Why Calvert filed this resolution? Because as a shareholder it sees climate change in terms of risks and opportunities that Amazon can’t and shouldn’t ignore any longer. Rebecca Henson, sustainability analyst at Calvert, explained it to Seattle Times:

"We own this company and want it to do well, so we wouldn't want any poor performance to come from the release of a document. We just think it's something that would be beneficial and could save money in the long run."

Amazon's shareholders rejected the measure mainly because Amazon was opposing it. Why Amazon opposed it? Well, according to Seattle Times "Amazon opposed the measure, saying that preparing a climate-change report would not be "an efficient use of time and resources."

I think this is a poor reply and definitely not the one you can and should expect from Amazon. We're talking about a company that in the same shareholder meeting reported on $34.2 billion sales and $2.5 billion free cash flow.

Now, how much it costs to prepare the report Calvert was asking for? If Amazon would use the format offered by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which is used by 70 percent of S&P 500 companies that unlike Amazon disclose their emissions, then it would be about $80,000 (65% of the companies surveyed by CDP are spending up to £50,000 on reporting greenhouse gas emissions). Let's say for the sake of arguments that it would be $100,000 because Amazon is a large company.

$100,000 are 0.004% of Amazon's free cash flow. In other words it is such a marginal expense, Amazon wouldn't even notice it. Actually, according to the CDP, most companies believe the benefits of reporting outweigh the costs, so there's a good chance it won't even be an expense at the end, but a profitable investment.

It's not just Calvert and I that are positive that climate change represents material risks and opportunities that should be assessed and considered accordingly. A growing number of investors understand that climate change is influencing every business and ignoring it equals poor management of their money.

Only yesterday climate change investor groups published a report on global investor practices relating to climate change, and according to their press release "the majority consider climate change a material investment risk/opportunity and incorporate climate change risk assessments into their existing investments; public policy a key driver of investment decisions". This report is based on survey responses from 44 asset owners and 46 asset managers with collective assets totalling more than $12trillion.

Unfortunately the majority of the shareholders of Amazon doesn't see it this way and chose last Tuesday to follow the company's position against a measure that even doesn't propose to take action, but only to prepare a climate change assessment.

For a company involved in the manufacturing and sale of the Kindle, providing web services, relying on data centers and using shipping it just doesn't make sense. Not to mention the fact that Amazon is a company that is proud in making decisions based on “long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions”. We hope that Jeff Bezos and Amazon will understand it eventually, not just for the sake of the environment, but also for the sake of the company's future success.

More related articles:

Why Amazon Needs to Come Clean About its Carbon Footprint - Triple Pundit

Why Amazon is so hush hush about the Kindle's sales figures and footprint?

Dear Jeff Bezos, please make Kindle the greenest e-reader

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

10 best ebooks on sustainable food!

We're back again with our weekly ten recommendations on green ebooks!

This week I prepared a list of book recommendations on one of my favorite topics - sustainable food .

This list is based on my personal preferences - some of them are relatively old, but I still find them relevant and valuable.

The links of these ebooks are to Amazon.com and I apologize in advance to all the Nook, iPad, Kobo and Sony Reader owners. I hope you can easily find an ebook you'll like on other ebookstores. This is also the place to disclose that we're taking part in Amazon's affiliate program and therefore will receive a small percentage of every purchase made using these links. We hope you don't mind! You can find all the lists published so far on our recommended green ebooks webpage (see examples at the bottom of this post).

Without further ado, here's this week's list of 10 recommended green e-books on sustainable food:

1. The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball - Scribner (October 12, 2010)

2. Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Oran Hesterman - PublicAffairs (May 31, 2011)

3. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan - Penguin (January 1, 2008)

4. The Seasons on Henry's Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm by Terra Brockman and Deborah Madison - Agate Surrey (April 28, 2010)

5.Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It by Karl Weber and Participant Media - PublicAffairs (May 5, 2009)

6. Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter - Penguin (June 11, 2009)

7. The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt - Rodale (March 16, 2010)

8. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch - Chelsea Green Publishing (November 12, 2008)

9. Food Matters by Mark Bittman - Simon & Schuster (December 30, 2008)

10. Farmer Jane by Temra Costa - Gibbs-Smith (July 29, 2010)

More recommended green ebooks lists:

Best ebooks for green entrepreneurs

Best green marketing ebooks

Best green business ebooks

See you next week!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Greenpeace is using Ken and Barbie to protest against Mattel's relationship with APP

What do you think of Barbie? Well, no matter what you have in mind, Greenpeace has news for you:

"Barbie has a nasty deforestation habit - she is trashing rainforests in Indonesia, including areas that are home to some of the last tiger, orang-utans and elephants, just so she can wrap herself in pretty packaging."

Apparently, Ken wasn't aware of it either:



Greenpeace started this campaign against Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie, accusing it in contributing to deforestation in Indonesia "by using paper packaging for the world's most famous toy from Indonesia's most notorious rainforest destroyer Asia Pulp and Paper (APP)."

Not only that Greenpeace calls supporters to tell Mattel to stop destroying rainforests for toy packaging, but they also extended the protest to Mattel HQ, as our friend, Ralf Skar reported on Greenpeace USA website:

"Wearing baby blue formal wear, Ken and a few buddies paid a visit to the Mattel HQ in Los Angeles today. And, by ‘pay a visit’, I mean they climbed on top of the building, strapped on climbing gear, dangled off the roof outside the windows of awe-struck employees, and hung a 2,500 square foot banner reading “It’s OVER” for Barbie to see. I guess you could say the guy has a flair for the dramatic."

You can see photos of the protest at Mattel HQ on Greenpeace's flickr page.

More articles on Greenpeace and APP:

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) - good or bad? ITS is saying APP is good and actually Greenpeace is bad!

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) - good or bad? Rolf Skar of Greenpeace is replying to Ian Lifshitz

APP - good or bad? An interview with the sustainability manager of the world's most controversial paper company

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Love reading? Have a big book library? Check our monthly subscription option!

I'd like to remind you with a great option that is available on our website - monthly subscription.

If you have a big library at home and you want to green it up one bookshelf or bookcase at a time, balancing out 5 or 10 books every month on regular basis, can be a good fit for you.

The process is very easy and similar to one-time purchase: On the subscription page you choose how many books you want to balance out each month. Then just click on the 'Buy' bottom and complete the payment process on the PayPal page. That's it.

Then, every month we'll balance out for you the number of books you chose by planting trees in developing countries with our planting partners. You will receive a confirmation email from PayPal following each monthly payment, and of course you will also receive our stickers on monthly basis.

And that's not all, if you're also a member at BookMooch.com, you will receive 1 bookmooch point for every 10 books you balance out!

If and when you'll decide that you want to suspend your subscription, you will be able to do it easily and quickly on PayPal website.

We are very happy to offer this option to all the eco-conscious readers out there who want to green up many of their books but want to do gradually. If you have any questions about the subscription option, please feel free to email me at: raz [at] ecolibris [dot] net.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Book review of Green Your Home: The Complete Guide to Making Your New or Existing Home Environmentally Healthy

Today we have a guest book review of “Green Your Home: The Complete Guide to Making Your New or Existing Home Environmentally Healthy” written by Taylor Dardan.

Jeanne Roberts does an excellent job of explaining different ways to make your home environmentally friendly in this suggested bookstore purchase. In the 2008 release from Atlantic Publishing Company, Roberts does a great job of setting the tone for the rest of the book by explaining the evaporating resources of the earth at this moment. She then goes on to explain the main reason the energy and fuel are diminishing is because of inflated use of our resources.

Essentially this set up allows Roberts to name a great number of things that will help to reverse escalating temperature and the cut in our natural resources. Roberts’ structure of using large references at first is very effective, because it puts the reader in perspective. She is able to draw the reader’s attention to the world’s large scale problems, then goes on to talk about the detailed ways to make your own impact on the major issues. Among the things Roberts suggested were filling the home with eco-friendly appliances and using incandescent light bulbs to help cut down on the overall utility costs at home.

Roberts’ transition from global effect to work at home is excellent. She touches on how the most important aspect of going green is evaluating your own things and moving forward from there. Her description points towards the fact that making little changes at first is the best way to adapt to an eco-friendly lifestyle. She says that it would be more valuable to see what you can replace and reuse around your home, rather than take a large undertaking. Among her tips, she claimed that switching out appliances or household cleaners and other things that could be replaced for little to no cost in the long run were great things to start with around the house.

In the most detail possible, Jeanne Roberts also explains some of the more detailed levels in which you can take to make your home more sustainable and green. Among the things she describes is the process for replacing your roof or using eco friendly insulation and how they can have multiple benefits to your own home. Not only will they help with sustainability, but they could end up preventing possible things like radon, asbestos exposure, and volatile organic compounds.

Within the book, Roberts does an outstanding job of covering all the bases of making your home more eco-friendly. She not only describes small, simple steps but also delves into a number of larger projects that people could be interested in as well. Her ability to touch on nearly all the aspects of going green at home make this a great option for anyone looking into an environmental book, especially for someone wanting to get some good tips. Along with an excellent structure for providing the reader both knowledge and tips, Roberts ability to go into great detail with multiple methods of going green makes this a great purchase option in the bookstore.

Alternative to slash and burn focus of new documentary, Up in Smoke

I just got an update that this week, on Thursday June 9, The Economist Film Project will showcase a new documentary called Up in Smoke, about a British scientist, Mike Hands, who has perfected a sustainable alternative to slash and burn agriculture in the Amazon, and is working with farmers in Honduras to put it into practice.

The Economist Film project is a partnership between The Economist and PBS NewsHour that presents documentaries that address social, economic, political, cultural and environmental issues of international importance. A segment from Up in Smoke will air during PBS NewsHour and will be featured on the project’s Web site. The segment and film bring to light a revolutionary, proven approach to deforestation in the Amazon that has shown remarkable promise, but continues to struggle to receive adequate support from the international community.

Here's the trailer of this interesting film:



You can read more about it at http://www.indiegogo.com/Up-in-Smoke

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!