Nestle

I recently saw an article title Nestle: Creating Shared Value and after all the hype in the news at the moment about Nestle I thought I should read it. At the moment, Nestle are being slated because the palm oil that they use in their kit-kats comes from suppliers that are not preserving the rainforest - in fact they are doing the opposite and expanding their use of the rainforest into the habitats of orangutans. This particular supplier has done more than any other to wipe out the rainforests of Indonesia. Greenpeace released a report on this last week, entitled 'Caught Red Handed: How Nestle's Use of Palm Oil is Destroying Rainforests and the Climate'. The address for this report is below (couldn't get it to paste the link sorry).

http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/caught-red-handed-how-nestle.pdf

Naturally, after hearing about all this, I was interested to look at this particular article, to see what Nestle were saying about their new 'Creating Shared Value' report. I agree that the issues that are mentioned in the report are very important, such as water and non-renewable energy use. In the 'Water and Environmental Sustainability' section of the report, Nestle states that they will be trying to cut down to a minimum their use of water, non-renewable energy and all other natural resources in order to attempt to cut down their environmental footprint. They have also started a project to cut down the use of lorries for transportation, and because of this 50% of their bottles in 2008 were transported via either train or a combination of trains and lorries. They are also looking into using more renewable energy, and they have a boiler in their Columbia factory which runs on used coffee beans, which provides 13% of the factory's energy, and has cut C02 emissions by 95% from the energy supply used before. I have to admit that these, along with other aims Nestle has, are good, and will make a difference to their Carbon footprint by a lot if they happen and continue to be used and grow. The report also states, in relation to the greenpeace report, that Nestle have no direct link with the palm oil plantation, and plan to have all their palm oil from sustainably managed sources by 2015. However, since this is 5 years away, how much can we believe? And is this enough when the orangutan is already being driven to extinction? A lot can happen in 5 years. I like to think that in a shorter space of time that Nestle will address this problem and stop destroying the habitats of helpless animals such as the orangutan.