Saturday Short Subjects: Go Ahead, Blow

Not so long ago Kimberly-Clark was the enemy in a war waged by the environmental group Greenpeace. The corporation was the target of the Kleercut Campaign, begun by Greenpeace in November 2004 to protest Kimberly-Clark's use of trees from Canada’s ancient Kenogami and Ogoki forests in Northern Ontario to manufacture its products. Kimberly-Clark's brands include Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex and Depend. Over the next five years Greenpeace helped organize a series of well-orchestrated protests including campus activism, civil disobedience, media campaigns, petitions, and institutional and consumer boycotts.

Greenpeace's hard work paid off. On August 5, 2009, Greenpeace announced that it was ending its Kleercut Campaign, stating that Kimberly-Clark’s new fiber sourcing standards would make the company “a leader for sustainably produced tissue products.” The entire campaign is archived in timeline form here. 

The corporation’s new goals were high: “Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the company's wood fiber for tissue products, including the Kleenex brand, from environmentally responsible sources. The revised standards will enhance the protection of Endangered Forests and increase the use of both Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified fiber and recycled fiber. By the end of 2011, Kimberly-Clark will ensure that 40 percent of its North American tissue fiber is either recycled or FSC certified - a 71 percent increase from 2007 levels that represents 600,000 tonnes of fiber.… Also by the end of 2011, Kimberly-Clark will eliminate the purchase of any fiber from the Canadian Boreal Forest that is not FSC certified” 

Kimberly-Clark has since divested its woodlands and pulping assets, but has established a global fiber procurement program committed to using environmentally responsible fiber.

This information is now printed on the bottom of the Kleenex box . 

FSC is the acronym for the Forest Stewardship Council, founded after the 1992 Earth summit in Rio failed to produce an agreement to stop deforestation. The Forest Stewardship Council mission is to promote environmentally sound, socially beneficial and economically prosperous management of the world's forests. The FSC trademarks enable consumers to choose products that support forest conservation, offer social benefits, and enable the market to provide an incentive for better forest management. 

This makes me feel a little better. Normally I am a hankie user. I have stacks of them – good for the usual light sneeze or sniffle, or tears at the movies. But with my recent cold from Hell I needed tissues – scads of them. What I discovered on the Kleenex box bottom cancelled my expected guilt trip.

Go ahead, blow (gently). 

I am hoping this is my last post on discoveries as a result of winter illness and that you are all well and warm. Have a great weekend.

Why Saturday Short Subjects? Some readers may recall  being dropped at the movie theater for the Saturday matinee — two action-packed feature films with a series of short subjects (cartoons or short movies, sometimes a serial cliffhanger) sandwiched in between. Often the short subjects were the most memorable, and enjoyable, part of the morning. That explains the name. The reason behind these particular posts is that we are all short on time. My Short Subject posts should not take me as long to write or you as long to read (or try).