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Fast Food Giant Yum! Releases Corporate Social Responsibility Report |
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Fails to address impacts of paper packaging on forests.
Much to our surprise, fast food giant Yum! Brands just released their first
ever Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. Unfortunately, they are still buying their
paper packaging from Southern forests, and other endangered forests around the
world.
Yum! Brands is huge. When it comes to their paper packaging decisions they are contributing to large scale clearcutting and conversion of natural forests to sterile pine plantations which has disastrous impacts on the biodiversity of Southern forests and communities.
Send a message to Yum! Brands CEO David Novak here.
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- Yum!
Brands (parent company of KFC, Long John Silvers, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and
A&W) is a major contributor to forest destruction in the Southern US and around the world.
- Last
week, the company published its first ever Corporate Social Responsibility
report which fails to address how
the company plans to reverse the impact its paper packaging choices have on
biodiversity, water quality and climate.
- Yum!
Brands is a major customer of International Paper, a company responsible
for the widespread destruction of forests and wetlands in the Southern US and around the world.
- While
countless other companies like Staples, Office Depot, Random House, Wal-Mart,
McDonald’s, Starbucks and others have developed sustainable paper
purchasing policies and taken action to help protect forests, to date, Yum!
Brands lags seriously behind.
- Yum!
Brands has done nothing to address its paper packaging purchasing which
has a major impact on Southern forests including large-scale clearcutting,
loss of endangered forests, and the conversion of natural forests to
industrial scale pine plantations.
- When
it comes to paper packaging choices, Yum! Brands has no clear plans for
increasing its use of purchases of
post consumer recycled paper or ensuring that its paper is certified by
FSC standards –the only independent global certification system in the
world accepted by the conservation, aboriginal and business communities.
- Yum!
Brands can show leadership in the fast food sector by adopting a
sustainable paper purchasing policy committing to:
- Increase
and maximizing the use of PCR content.
- End
sourcing from endangered forests
- End sourcing
from forests converted to plantations…
- Increase
packaging efficiency and reduction
- Source
paper from sustainably managed forests like those certified by the Forest
Stewardship Council (FSC)
Take action click here.
Taking these steps would not only save forests but also help
reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
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Although Yum! Brands has attempted to increase its public image through the production and dissemination of this Corporate Social Responsibility report, it has failed to compete with similar and competing world-wide corporations in modernizing their logging practices and thereby decreasing their environmental impact. In this report, Yum! Brands gleefully reports their reduction or stagnation in CO2 emissions and attempts at using recycled material throughout their lower divisions. However, when it comes to moderniizing their logging practices in order to reduce the clear cutting of Eastern forests, Yum! Brands is still in the figurative Stone Age.
Walmart, Staples, Starbucks, Random House, Office Depot, and many others have changed their logging practices within the last decade in order to maintain a greener image, sustain Eastern forests, and remain competitive in today's market; Yum! Brands has failed to move on this front. Yum! Brands continues to purchase paper for their packaging material from corporations which clear cut Eastern forests, resulting in the replacement of pristine temperate forests for tracks of pine plantations. This practice results in a staggering loss of ecological biodiversity and ultimately with less resources available for human gain.
If Yum! Brands added to this CSR report by commenting on plans to change its paper-purchasing practices to more eco-friendly, biosustainable ones that use methods whereby sourcing is ended from endangered forests, pine plantations are not produced by the packaging companies through which Yum! Brands purchases its packaging material, and to source paper from sustainably managed forests, the image of Yum! Brands would be much better in the eyes of the public.
Companies which maintain sustainably managed forests are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) (www.fscus.org).
- Marc A. Milne
PhD Ecology Student, Old Dominion University