High profile companies like Kimberly-Clark, Sears, and Best Buy accused of fuelling the destruction of Canada’s Boreal Forest
March 27, 2008 Four Greenpeace activists have been arrested after attempting to unfurl a massive 3.1 x 34 metre banner inside Toronto’s Eaton Center. The message: “Sears, Best Buy, Indigo Books, Toys “R” Us, Canadian Tire and Kleenex = Boreal Forest Destruction.”
The activists went to Canada's premiere shopping centre to highlight the important role corporate customers can play in protecting the Boreal Forest from unsustainable logging. Greenpeace says the companies should demand products that are ancient forest friendly.
The companies named, which also include Talbots and Harlequin Books, are customers of logging giants AbitibiBowater, Kruger, Buchanan and pulp manufacturer SFK Pulp. The customers pay millions of dollars to these logging companies to convert ancient Boreal Forest into toilet paper, facial tissue, throwaway flyers, romance novels and.
The action follows a series of activities in 2007 to highlight the urgent crisis of disappearing intact Boreal Forest in Ontario and Quebec. In July, Greenpeace activists hung a banner from the headquarters of Abitibi-Consolidated and in September the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise blockaded an export of pulp destined for Europe.
The situation in the Boreal Forest requires immediate action because:
• An area three times the size of France has already been degraded and fragmented by development in the Boreal Forest region (175 million hectares).
• AbitibiBowater, Kruger and Buchanan all log in woodland caribou habitat despite the fact that the woodland caribou is a federally listed threatened species in Canada. The scientific consensus is that they will go extinct unless vast areas of forest are protected.
• Kimbely-Clark uses more than 350,000 tonnes of pulp from the Boreal Forest annually to make disposable products like tissue and toilet paper.
• AbitibiBowater has the logging rights to a larger volume of wood in Ontario and Quebec than any other company. Less than 30 per cent of land controlled by AbitibiBowater remains intact.
Canada's Boreal Forest is one of the most important forests left on the planet, stretching from Newfoundland to the Yukon. It represents a quarter of the world’s remaining intact ancient forests and stores 186 billion tonnes of carbon in its soils and trees.
Less than nine per cent of the forest in Ontario and five per cent in Quebec are protected from industrial development.
Since the governments of Ontario and Quebec and the logging companies have failed to protect this globally important forest, we're taking our battle to the international markets. We know that when customers demand change and threaten to move their business elsewhere, suppliers – the logging companies - change their ways.
