Green Lifestyle Campaigned by Major Company in Indonesia

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - An Indonesian major multinational company, Unilever, will continue campaigning against global warming promoting a green lifestyle by way of its CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programs up to the consumers.

"We are actively campaigning to save the earth’s movement of employees through Unilever Indonesia’s volunteer program in which employees are invited to plant trees in Unilever’s adopted forests," Unilever Assistant Environment Program Manager Astri Wahyuni said here Wednesday.

Astri said that last year the company has adopted five hectares of forests in Gunung Gede Pangrango, West Java, where employees also participated in planting trees. Besides the the forest adoption program, Unilever actively conducts a campaign against global warming through the Green Festival in the last three years to educate the public on the impact of global warming and ways of overcoming at family level, Astri said.

According to Astri, the event was attended by more than 20,000 people. "We also have a Green School program and a Green Office focusing on changing people’s behavior to reduce the impact of global warming in schools and offices in Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bandung.

To achieve a greener Indonesia, the company also has an environmental program called "Unilever Green and Clean" focusing on changing people’s behavior in managing their household waste and greens.

"The program’s strategy is to empower the community by establishment and debriefing to the environmental facilitators and cadres as agents of change," Astri said.

This program is conducted in 10 major cities namely Jakarta, Bandung, Medan, Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Banjarmasin, Balikpapan, Makassar, Denpasar and Manado, and also managed to form some 134.000 environmental cadres.

Products to Support Green Lifestyle

In addition to Green and Clean educational program, Unilever has also continued innovating products to reduce their carbon footprints at the consumer level. In addition to one of its laundry softener liquid products, the company has made a breakthrough by only rinsing once, focusing on saving water at household scale, where habits to rinse three times had been reduced to once, she said.

Besides, Unilever also released a water purification equipment that runs without electricity and gas that allows consumers to obtain clean water to the minimum. "In the future, we will focus the program on the role of garbage banks in the community as an institution to increase the economic value of wastes, making waste reduction process to become more effective," she said.

Currently the company already has 19 cooperative garbage banks that are able to absorb 14.400 kg of waste within a period of six months of its implementation. To add more support on the green lifestyle that is developing currently according to the rise of global warming threats in the production of raw material the company chose the production process with always applies the green and sustainability principles.

"In the process of raw materials selection, we have a program to found black soybean farmers for one of our soy sauce product," she said.

Farmers are trained to apply environmentally friendly and sustainable agriculture, the finally the black soy beans production is entirely bought by the company.

"While on business operations, we always follow the PROPER program from the Environment Ministry as a benchmark for the environmentally friendly company business, which led us to achieve the Proper Green predicate in 2010," she said.