Also by ianduff

APP pulps trees from its own tiger sanctuary. How dumb is that?

Posted by ianduff - 16 December 2011 at 4:04pm - 3 Comments
Forest and peatland clearance inside APP's Senepis tiger sanctuary
All rights reserved. Credit: Eyes on the Forest/WW Indonesia
This was APP's Senepis Tiger Sanctuary, until one of APP's suppliers cut down the trees

Asia Pulp and Paper – the company doing so much to jeopardise the future of Indonesia's rainforests – has done some pretty stupid things in the past. But pulping the trees in its own tiger sanctuary is astonishingly dumb.

And yet that's exactly what APP has done.

Facting Aida! Yet again

Posted by ianduff - 15 October 2010 at 2:59pm - 0 Comments
Deforested area in Bukit Tigapuluh, Indonesia. Once important habitat for Sumatran tigers.

Now the arrival in the UK of Aida Greenbury, the Director of Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement for the notorious Asia Pulp and Paper, is always going to get Greenpeace excited - it’s not often she has to defend her company's actions live and online. But our excitement turned a little sour when APP refused our request to debate Aida directly on Print Week's webcast. Perhaps APP's new PR agency Cohn and Wolfe is advising Aida against talking to us in public.

Sinar Mas plays its latest joker

Posted by ianduff - 1 October 2010 at 3:16pm - 0 Comments

It seems that Sinar Mas hasn’t learnt from last month’s mistakes and is labouring on with a strategy of hiring auditors to distract attention from their ongoing involvement in forest and peatland destruction.

This week Sinar Mas's pulp and paper arm – Asia Pulp and Paper - released a new 'independent audit' that purports to prove that Greenpeace investigations are wrong and our evidence of forest destruction unfounded. The people behind the audit are, shall we say, a little less independent than they claim. Alan Oxley and his consultancy International Trade Strategies Global (ITS) are an Australian outfit who have a track record of working for companies engaged in unsustainable business practices - including logging companies.

Sinar Mas gets ultimatum from RSPO over palm oil and deforestation

Posted by ianduff - 23 September 2010 at 6:03pm - 1 Comment

At last, the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is threatening action following the release last month of the independent audit commissioned by Sinar Mas, which showed that the company had been breaking Indonesian law and RSPO rules.

A defining moment for the palm oil industry as Unilever breaks link with forest destruction?

Posted by ianduff - 11 December 2009 at 2:34pm - 19 Comments

As world leaders line up in Copenhagen to agree a new climate treaty, we've also been working hard to secure a result that will have a positive impact on the global climate - by protecting Indonesia's forests.

Today we're publicly releasing new evidence that Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s biggest palm oil producer, has been persistently engaging in widespread illegal deforestation and peatland clearance. We presented presented the evidence in this dossier to one of their biggest customers, the giant Unilever corporation. Now Unilever has decided to stop buying palm oil from Sinar Mas.

As our activists stop rainforest destruction, we want the UK government to take a lead

Posted by ianduff - 13 November 2009 at 5:28pm - 2 Comments

Greenpeace activists shut down an APRIL logging concession yesterday.

Ian is the member of our forests campaigning team dealing with Indonesia.

Yesterday, as Greenpeace activists were preparing to close down the pulp and paper operations of one of Indonesia's biggest forest criminals APRIL, (or 'Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings'), back here in the UK I was just starting a meeting with UK climate minister Joan Ruddock.

What's the connection between our activists in the field, and me in a meeting room in London? Well it certainly wasn't our choice of outfits - they probably wouldn't let me into DECC with a red boiler suit on, and a suit and tie isn't particularly suitable for the Indonesian rainforest.