Don’t Palm Off These Beautiful Creatures!

Posted by in Sustainability Marketing

Even though Greenwashing is on the decline these days, it is still prevalent across many popular industries. It’s very popular to scrutinize the legitimacy of the commitment of bigger and more mature companies to their “Green” initiatives and goals.

This scrutiny is well deserved because most of the times these giant companies are also some of the biggest polluters and creators of negative externalities further down their products supply chain. Two critical factors firms do consider when communicating their value proposition to consumers is engagement and more importantly credibility as we discussed in class. Failing to succeed in those two factors can really hurt a company’s brand reputation and customer relationships.

So after learning all this, I was extremely disappointed to run across this article right here. The article discusses the absolute abuse of Indonesian and Malaysian jungles that occurs due to palm oil harvesting by giant confectionary companies Nestlé, Mars and Hershey. These companies have all previously made pledges to clean up their supply chain with a specific focus given to sustainable and ethical palm oil sourcing. They have all delayed or watered down these plans and in some cases even clearly violated them.This palm oil is harvested on land that should lawfully be inhabited by orangutans, rhinos, tigers, clouded leopards and many more rare and endangered species that are getting wiped out rapidly.The World Wildlife Fund has stated that an area equivalent to the size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. This is a pretty shocking metric that really gets the severity of this issue across. This is a great source to learn more about this issue in detail if you are interested in the topic.

Learning that Halloween, one of my absolute favorite celebrations has been tainted by this complete violation of trust by these large firms is devastating. Businesses are promising to use more plantations and ethical suppliers to source the palm oil, but this commitment is not rock solid and the change is not occurring fast enough. Should we as consumers assure that these companies face some sort of backlash for these blatant lies? Do you think the government should intervene in an issue that is becoming so critical to ecology maintenance? It is difficult to sit silent as a consumer when considering this matter.

References:

Image 1: ISEAL Credibility Principles

Image 2: Don’t Palm Us Off Campaign

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