After years of stonewalling and greenwashing, Procter & Gamble—the $361 billion multinational known best for its laundry detergent, razor blades, toilet paper and, sadly, rainforest destruction—has finally started to budge.
Tireless pressure from grassroots activists, Indigenous leaders, and those of us stubborn enough to keep receipts forced P&G to make positive changes to its deforestation and human rights policies.
To be sure: these changes didn’t happen because P&G suddenly grew a conscience—they happened because we didn’t let up.
P&G’s executives have talked for years about being “sustainability-driven” while fueling some of the dirtiest industries on Earth.
We’ve repeatedly exposed them for having ties to illegal palm oil production in the Orangutan Capital of the World, shadow companies driving mass deforestation in Indonesia, and paper producers engaged in intimidation and violence against forest defenders.
And when we showed up—with hard evidence, petitions, and protests—they played the usual game:
Deny. Delay. Deflect.
The turning point wasn’t a single report or major celebrity endorsement. Instead, it was relentless, on-the-ground organizing.
Investigators went deep undercover to expose the iniquities of P&G’s supply chains. People from P&G’s Cincinnati homebase to the palm oil and paper-ravaged Sumatran countryside put their bodies on the line to demand a change. Descendants of P&G’s original co-founders, William Procter and James Gamble, even put themselves front-and-center in the fight.
Last, but not least, everyday people signed tens of thousands of petitions, made thousands of phone calls, and relentlessly comment-bombed P&G product pages and social media posts.
When the public started to care, the C-suite followed.
Did we get everything we demanded? No. But what we got is still significant:
- Acknowledging that protecting rainforests starts with protecting the rights of the people who live there—the local and Indigenous communities fighting on the front lines of deforestation.
- Addressing intimidation and violence forest and land defenders face by committing to develop a Human Rights Defender procedure.
- Requiring suppliers to adopt a policy to prohibit deforestation, peatland destruction and rights violations.
- Robust no-deforestation commitments in pulp and palm oil supply chains that now include provisions to address rights violations.
- Suspending dirty suppliers—taking real action to clean up their supply chains by cutting out producers who destroy the environment and people’s lives.
Translation: P&G is finally headed in the right direction. And in corporate America, that’s exceedingly rare.
But corporate pledges are only as good as the pressure behind them. If P&G thinks it can quietly walk back these changes, or consign them to a policy document in some forlorn corner of the internet, then we’ve got news for them: we’ll still be here. And we’re going to be pushing for more.
This is a win not because P&G grew a conscience overnight, but because organized people beat organized money—again.
P&G wanted this to go away and we didn’t let it. Let’s keep going.