Why 'Big Paper' Just Went Green in Indonesia

Workers tend to acacia seedlings at a nursery in Pelalawan, in Indonesia’s Riau Province. The seedlings will be planted in managed plantations in the area.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / February 19, 2013


It's all around you, all the time. Tidily rolled up next to the toilet when you wake up in the morning, handed to you at the corner cafe with your morning coffee, all over your desk at work, and surrounding much of the food you buy at the grocery store before heading home.

And for years, this product – paper – so ubiquitous you only really notice it when it's not there, has been coming at a horrific cost – the annihilation of the richest, most biologically diverse rain forests on the planet by a sprawling company with over $4 billion in annual revenue that you've probably never heard of: Asia Pulp & Paper Co. Ltd. (The company says it's worth about $10 billion.)

But this month, if the company is to be taken at its word, that is changing. In early February APP promised not to use a single splinter of wood again from natural forest, a stunning reversal that has environmental campaigners overjoyed. Why did it happen?

In the end, it was down to the combined efforts of the corporations behind Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, and Barbie. While what's left of Indonesia's forests hasn't been saved yet, with skepticism abounding about whether the company will deliver on its promises, the unprecedented market pressure that was put on APP ahead of its announcement heralds a sea change in the way the largest corporations in the world do business.

Environmental activists have had APP and its larger parent, the Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas, in their sights for two decades. But they struggled to make headway against the company's general indifference to environmental concerns, Indonesian government corruption, and the challenge of connecting seemingly innocuous paper to the disappearance of orangutans and Sumatran tigers in the minds of consumers.

"I think this will stand as one of the biggest market-based campaign successes that we've seen in a long time," says Laurel Sutherlin of the Rainforest Action Network, which, along with Greenpeace and other environmental groups, spent years trying to tie well-known brands to rain forest destruction. Their effort saw dozens of major paper consumers eventually adopt standards for using sustainable products that essentially froze APP out of much of the European and US markets. "We're still a little bit stunned, to be honest," he says.

Mr. Sutherlin describes 18 months of negotiations with The Walt Disney Co. that were kick-started when activists hired actors to dress up as Minnie and Mickey Mouse and lock themselves to the company's Burbank, Calif., headquarters, displaying a banner that read "Disney is destroying Indonesia's rainforests."

By last October the company, which has about $40 billion in annual sales, had passed new standards requiring that all paper used in everything from the packaging of its toys to movie posters be sustainably sourced, effectively cutting off APP, which has aggressive expansion plans, from a potentially huge customer. Not only that, but the company has promised to demand those standards from all its suppliers and licenses. As a sign of how far that can ripple out, Sutherlin says that when Disney adopted its new policy it had to be translated into 35 languages.

It wasn't the only one. Nine of the top 10 US publishers have adopted similar standards, with Harper Collins coming on board just a few weeks before APP's announcement.
In 2011, when Greenpeace discovered that Mattel, the toy company that makes the Barbie doll, was using APP paper for its packaging, it targeted the company with a video campaign in which Ken, the toy's boyfriend, is shocked and enraged to discover that Barbie is responsible for rain forest destruction, and dumps her in response. Mattel soon adopted new standards.

Rolf Skar, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace, says globalization, often viewed as a driver of environmental ills, is in some ways making the group's recent success possible. "You have to find a brand that resonates with people, so you take a Barbie box, the most famous toy in the world, and then you're linking Barbie boxes to environmental destruction all over the world," he says. "As the world has gotten flatter and cultures have homogenized to some degree, it's gotten easier."

Greenpeace has had a lead role in negotiations with APP over the past year, and he explains the reason his group is optimistic that a real corner has been turned. "Our group in Indonesia has no illusions about APP given their track record over the years. In the past there were commitments from behind the podium with no details, no plans, no transparency. So it was very easy to scratch your head and say how are you going to get from Point A to Point B?"

This time, however, he says the company has laid out how it's going to rely on acacia and eucalyptus tree plantations it has developed over the years (on previously clear-cut forestland), and there seems to be support for the shift at the top. He describes the presence of Sinar Mas and APP Chairman Teguh Ganda Wijaya sitting at the podium with Indonesia's forestry minister to announce a commitment to environmental protection as "almost surreal for me … we've never seen that high level support before."


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