A partnership between Nestlé, The Forest Trust and a leading palm oil supplier may have created a new model for more sustainability

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Nine more companies joins the likes of Nestle, Kraft, Unilever, Adidas, Mattel and many more who have already dropped APP following the ongoing campaign Greenpeace is running against APP following a Greenpeace’s report accusing APP in cutting protected tree species in Indonesia. The list of customers that leave APP is indeed growing, but the company doesn’t seem to show any signs of change, at least for now. Even now, with nine less customers, APP seems reluctant to throw in the towel. So who wins this fight – Greenpeace or APP?

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If you were wondering what would be the next stop in the journey of businesses to identify their impacts and dependencies on ecosystem services, you got an answer earlier this week. After disclosing their carbon and water footprints, companies are moving now to disclose their forest footprint. Why they do it? Are these companies becoming the new treehuggers?

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Several studies show that minority parents are more likely to give their children bottled water. A study by the department of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin found that African American and Latino families are three times more likely to give their children only bottled water as compared to white families. The Archives of [...]

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Water crises from Texas to Australia have hit commodity supplies. Changes in the world’s weather patterns now affect corporate profits across various industries.

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Nestle has a very pro-GMO policy and has invested in GM-coffee research, so its vocal anti-organic stance is to be expected. In 2008, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board of Nestlé S.A. even asked policymakers in Europe to re-evaluate their opposition to GMO. According to him “You have to be rational. There’s no way you [...]

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The following is part of a series by our friends at CSRHub (a 3p sponsor) – offering free sustainability and corporate social responsibility ratings on over 5,000 of the world’s largest publicly traded companies. 3p readers get 40% off CSRHub’s professional subscriptions with promo code “TP40.” By Carol Pierson Holding Americans are both addicted to [...]

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As You Sow’s work reveals that Coca-Cola and Nestlé Waters North America have started to push for extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for post consumer packaging.

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In the United Kingdom town of York, the Nestle plant that churns out over a billion Kit Kats and 183 million guilt-inducing Aero bar annually has achieved a zero waste milestone four years early.

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Last year it was decided by popular vote that Barbie made a better journalist than an environmental activist. Probably just as well because this year, her parent company Mattel is being targeted by Greenpeace on their CSR practices. Using a social media onslaught, Greenpeace activists alleged that Mattel uses rainforest-sourced paper pulp in its packaging, thus [...]

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The road to sustainable business now passes through a glass tunnel called “Transparency.” Consumers exercise their singular, unequivocal influence: their ability to choose the company that not only creates, markets and sells a product that is to their liking, but does so in a manner that is consistent with their values. And here, in this [...]

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This is a continuation of the interview in three parts with Michael Washburn, newly appointed Director of Sustainability for Nestlé Waters North America. 3p: If your number one sustainability concern is the bottle, why not move to a 100% recycled PET bottled as Naked Juice has done? MW: Are you familiar with our Resource brand? [...]

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One of Nestlé’s brands, Arrowhead, has made a huge move in Oregon. The company wants to tap at least 100 million gallons of water from a new spring near the state’s iconic Mount Hood. The new water source has the potential to reverse Nestlé’s sagging sales. But there’s a problem: more than a few Oregonians are furious.

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In the coming decade, Nestlé will work on improving coffee yields while mitigating environmental damage with the sustainable agriculture advocacy group The Rainforest Alliance. The US$336 million Nescafé Plan commits Nestlé to expand its agricultural research and training capacity for the benefit the 25 million people who make their living growing and trading coffee beans.

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Building on the idea that what gets measured gets managed, Michael Levine of Fonterra presented a carbon footprint Life Cycle Analysis for the dairy industry, illustrating that 85% of the carbon is produced on-farm (59% of which is cow-produced methane), 10% comes from processing and 5% results from distribution. He noted that one might assume [...]

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Non-profits and NGOs should publish sustainability reports as corporations do for several reasons.

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HSBC, the international and emerging markets bank based in London, last week said it has sold-off its shares in the Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas following a Greenpeace report of alleged illegal forest clearance practices. Meanwhile, other companies, including Unilever, Kraft and Nestle, are backing out of palm oil contracts with Sinar Mas. (See [...]

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By Siobhán McGurrin, journalism graduate student, UCA London (Please read Part 1 of “Greenwashing Profiteers” here) In terms of money, both Cadbury and Nestlé are hardly without the means to sort questions over their operations; with a turnover of £6 billion (USD$9 billion) last year, Mr. Cadbury took home £808 million (USD$1.2 billion) in profit, whilst Mr. Nestle took [...]

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By Siobhán McGurrin, journalism graduate student, UCA London In recent years, Britain has established itself as a forerunner in ethical consumer consciousness due to our keen awareness of green products. With “expenditure growing threefold in the last 10 years” according to Co-operative’s 2009 ethical consumerism report, our response to eco and ethical produce has been [...]

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Digital and visual storytelling are all the rage these days, and for good reason.  Going viral on Youtube can result in powerful changes.  For example, Greenpeace’s Nestle campaign started with a one minute video connecting eating KitKat’s to killing orangutans for palm oil.  Within months, Nestle had made the requested changes to its purchasing. Last [...]

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Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo. Nestle announced on May 17 it would partner with The Forest Trust (TFT) to create “responsible supply chains” starting with palm oil. Nestle’s decision to partner with TFT came about as a result of a Greenpeace campaign that started in March. Within hours of a campaign launch [...]

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Starbucks, a company not new to environmental criticism, was recently faced with a seemingly modest proposal by a Starbucks shareholder to consider a more aggressive strategy and set of goals for recycling the materials that are consumed within and leave their doors. The measure was voted down after the Board of Directors advised shareholders to [...]

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By David Jay “Water is the next carbon” has become a go-to-soundbyte in the workshops and conferences I’ve been attending recently. But the closer I’ve looked, the more I’ve begun to uncover reasons why that’s just not true. Why Water is Smaller than Carbon At first glance, managing water seems like a coming echo of [...]

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Some skeptics question the value of corporate social responsibility reports.  They point to the resources expended on producing these documents and demand  “Who reads them, anyway?”  While that may be a valid question, I think a more informative question is “What value does producing a CSR report offer to the company doing the reporting?” Based [...]

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More articles on the controversy surrounding bottled water can be found here! Camelback, the Petaluma, Calif.-based maker of reusable water bottles, has donated 2,000 water bottles to the residents of Bundanoon, a small tourist town 90 miles southwest of Sydney, Australia. When it decided in July to ban the sale of bottled water, Bundanoon became [...]

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More articles on the controversy surrounding bottled water can be found here! Water and water bottles seem to be flowing into headlines as often as healthcare these days. But activists in the Northern California town of McCloud are claiming victory in a six-year battle to block Nestle Waters North America from erecting a water bottling [...]

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More articles on the controversy surrounding bottled water can be found here! Photo: Telegraph.co.uk Bottled water was in the headlines several times this week, including a piece in the New York Times. Not only is bottled water a poor environmental choice, but according to two new reports, one from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and [...]

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Over 650 business and brand strategists, designers and sustainability executives gathered in Monterey, CA last week for the Sustainable Brands ‘09 conference. The three-day event brought together attendees from all over the world representing a broad blend of industries and experience levels. The program offered equal measures of education and inspiration for everyone, from beginners [...]

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Sending a message in a bottle might conjure up all kinds of romantic notions about chance and opportunity, but it’s not a very effective way to communicate with another party. Much more effective is to print a message right smack on a bottle and send it through the US Mail. This greatly improves your chances [...]

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Nestle considers itself to be a health and wellness company. Nestle Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe explained that the company changed from a “strictly food and beverage company” to a health and wellness company because the “quality of calories matters.” Letmathe pointed out that life expectancy and calorie intake go together. Looking at history, the more calories [...]

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