Woolies pay lip service to the environment

An article in Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald reports Woolworths (Safeway) supermarkets have suddenly developed an environmental conscience.

The report, by Ben Cubby, details Woolworths’ plan to “conform to stringent environmental standards” by upgrading most of their old supermarket fridges.

The fridges currently in use by Woolworths and Safeway are described as chronically leaking potent greenhouse gas as well as having “high energy consumption”.

So the fact that Woolworths Ltd. has now decided to upgrade some of their environmentally damaging greenhouse gas-emitting fridges, is great. HOWEVER, the faact still remains that Woolworths (including Safeway), continue to permit the destruction of the environment through the suppliers of their OWN HOMEBRAND SELECT tissue products.

Back in November 2007, for the company AGM, Woolworths promised to investigate their suppliers, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) – a company the WWF wont even certify because of all of the environmental damage they do.

Yet Michael Luscombe has done nothing!! The company has not announced their findings, or even that the investigation is underway. If they can not confirm that their toilet paper, tissue and paper towel is from sustainable sources, the product should be REMOVED FROM THE SHELVES. Once again, I think this is just a stalling tactic from Woolworths, hoping shoppers will forget.

Woolworths continue to be an environmental vandal every day they sell the Select toilet paper, tissues and paper towel.

Waiting and watching to see what Woolworths and Luscombe do

I was looking over what Michael Luscombe who’s the CEO of Woolworths, looking at what he said last week, and I’m really worried that this is not the end of the problem.

If you look carefully what he said, you’ll see he is leaving plenty of room (semantics, weasel words, call it what you will) so that Woolworths can go away, put new labels on the old product, and use new packaging to put the same old products back on the shelves. The fact that the packaging doesn’t say it’s environmentally friendly doesn’t make the logging of old growth forests and the bullying tactics used by Woolworths’ supplier, in any way acceptable, at all.

That sort of action is totally contemptuous of the public and of ethical practice. If the products come from a suspect company then it doesn’t matter if you change the packaging!

We must remain vigilant - we can’t let Woolworths get away with such fraud. These products should never be put back on the shelves until we can all independently verify that they come from sustainable plantations.

We can’t trust Woolworths to tell us the truth and I don’t want them to get away with putting the products on sale again under new packaging.

Keep contacting Woolworths on the numbers in other posts to tell them you won’t let them get away with treating customers like idiots and destroying forests and habitat in China and Indonesia.