COLGATE: STOP BRUSHING AWAY OUR FORESTS!

The maker of Colgate and Tom's of Maine is giving us a serious case of planetary decay.

Colgate-Palmolive might have squeaky clean products, but they work with the world's dirtiest suppliers!

Help us tell their CEO to brush up his supply chains!

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CEO

Noel R.

Wallace

Colgate-Palmolive

Dear Noel R. Wallace,

Rainforest Action Network’s 2023 "Keep Forests Standing Scorecard" has given Colgate-Palmolive an abysmal “D-” grade on its efforts to address its role in driving deforestation and human rights abuses. One of the reasons for this low score is the fact that Colgate-Palmolive continues to buy product ingredients from a notorious agribusiness called Royal Golden Eagle (RGE) Group. It is time for Colgate-Palmolive to suspend all sourcing from the RGE, effective immediately.

RGE has been implicated in numerous cases of deforestation and rights abuses throughout Indonesia, home to some of humanity’s last major rainforests. Despite RGE’s “No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation” (NDPE) commitments, we exposed their palm oil arm Apical for sourcing from suppliers that had illegally destroyed parts of the cherished and heavily protected Singkil Bengkung forest in Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem, also known as the “Orangutan capital of the world.”

RGE has also been involved in land grabs. Notably, an RGE wood products company called Toba Pulp Lestari (TPL) has occupied Indigenous Batak Toba territories in Sumatra’s Lake Toba region for decades — an occupation that has forced many Batak Toba community members to devote their lives to an existential struggle against TPL to prevent further destruction of their lifeways and ancestral lands.

These two isolated cases are a small piece of RGE’s expansive operations, and their ambitions are growing. A recent exposé called "Pulping Borneo" found that RGE continues to source from suppliers destroying rainforests in Borneo, and there are strong indications that RGE — and the notorious tycoon who owns RGE, Sukanto Tanoto — is involved in a new pulp mill project that will threaten 600,000 hectares of standing rainforests in Borneo and Papua.

Corporations, including Colgate-Palmolive, must live up to the spirit of their NDPE commitments — the planet cannot wait. Part of doing so is by eliminating known deforesters and rights abusers from your company’s supply chains. Colgate-Palmolive has recently strengthened its NDPE policies to require its suppliers to comply across their operations of the corporate group, what is Colgate-Palmolive waiting for?

I am requesting that you put the RGE Group on Colgate-Palmolive’s no-buy list immediately, until third-party verification can demonstrate that RGE is adhering to NDPE practices across its operations.

Kind regards,

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