All posts filed under: Palm oil

Metamorphosis of destructive logging companies

By Michael Gerhardt The German version of this post can be found here. This article was published as well on The Ecologist , World Rainforest Movement Bulletin , Redd Monitor, World Nutrition and Robin Wood Blog . It sounds like a fairy tale. Multinational companies destroy forests and trample on human rights. Then, international environmental organisations come into play and transform the culprits into responsible companies within just a few months. Multinational palm oil, pulp and paper companies such as Wilmar, Golden Agri, APRIL (Asia Pacific Resources International Limited) or APP (Asia Pulp and Paper) have already completed the magic metamorphosis from destroyers to protectors of the Indonesian rainforest. All of these companies now sport a “zero deforestation policy”. Similar promises have also been made by consumer goods giants like Nestle, Unilever, Mars, L’Oreal, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, who require palm oil as a raw material for their products. Greenpeace, WWF and Co. appear to have success in what Indonesian environmental groups have been struggling to achieve for years, that is persuading notorious rainforest …

Six reasons why eco-labels are not a good idea for the bioeconomy

By Peter Gerhardt They exist for wood, paper, palm oil or cod: sustainability labels. All too often, these have been launched with great fanfare for a better world, only to realise soberly soon after that overexploitation and environmental destruction simply continue. This could be due to the fact that many of these voluntary certification initiatives have a few fundamental flaws built in. The hope is that politics, business and associations will learn from past mistakes and question eco-labels with scepticism. This is particularly true with regard to the current bioeconomy debate, regarding the transformation of our economy from fossil to biological. Here, too, the call for eco-certificates is getting louder. Already today, the planet is exhausted by the biomass we demand from it: This leads to overfished oceans for Captain Iglo and destroyed rainforests for three-euro chicken. If fossil raw materials are to be completely replaced by biomass in the future, the question consequently arises on which earth this biomass should grow on, or which environmental crimes or human rights violations we might want to …