Greenpeace to publish environmental report on Olympic sponsors

BEIJING - Greenpeace is gearing up for a campaign targeting Olympic sponsors with the release of a report highlighting the environmental failings of sponsors.

However the NGO is not expected to be staging public protests against sponsors in Beijing.

Jamie Choi, corporate social responsibility campaigner, Greenpeace China, said: "For the Beijing Olympics, we are mainly engaged in privately lobbying of sponsors. We have decided this will bear the maximum effect."

The report will be released in July. "We will talk honestly about the achievements as well as the failures of sponsors in this report, and the environmental achievements and failures of the 2008 Olympics as a whole," Choi added.

Greenpeace was recently successful in its protests against Unilever for the role of its Dove brand in destroying Indonesia's peat rainforests. The protests were staged in Europe, where the NGO is granted more freedom to air its views.

Greenpeace produced a pastiche of Dove's "onslaught" film, alerting viewers to Dove's use of palm oil, a crop that is fast replacing Indonesian rainforest. The film, called "onslaught(er)", was posted on YouTube.com.

Meanwhile activists dressed up as orangutans, the apes endangered by habitat loss from palm oil production, and protested outside Unilever offices.

Unilever responded by pledging to source palm oil only from sustainable forests.

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