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By Lookout Staff

March 17 -- Greenpeace urged Santa Monica teachers and school officials to remove Kleenex products from their classrooms during a “Forest Friendly Family Fair” Saturday afternoon.

The group told the more than 50 Santa Monicans who showed up that Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex tissues and the world's largest tissue manufacturer, is clear-cutting the North American Boreal forest to make tissues from 100 percent virgin fiber.

“Today, dozens of parents and teachers pledged to make their classrooms Kleenex-free,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Nikitas Mentiodes. “By removing Kleenex from the classroom, parents and teachers are setting a strong example to our children that we will not tolerate the destruction of ancient forests.”

One of the largest intact ancient forests the North American Boreal forest is home to indigenous communities, as well as caribou, lynx, songbirds and wolves, Greenpeace officials said.

“The boreal forests that Kimberly-Clark gets its pulp from have been evolving since the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, and have never been logged before,” Greenpeace officials said.

“Greenpeace is calling on Kimberly-Clark to drastically increase their use of post-consumer recycled content in their disposable products, to only use Forest Stewardship Council certified wood for their remaining virgin fiber needs and to stop clear-cutting in endangered forests in the Boreal and elsewhere in the world,” the group said in a statement.

Teachers, parents and school officials who attended Saturday’s fair pledged to remove Kleenex products from their classroom, while children who attended played “Pin the Tree on the Boreal,” took pictures at the Forest Friendly photo booth and had their faces painted as animals from the Boreal forest.

Greenpeace launched the Kleenex Free School Program after several universities, including Wesleyan, replaced Kimberly-Clark products with alternatives high in recycled fiber.

According to Kimberly-Clark, less than 15 percent of the fiber it uses globally comes from the Canadian boreal forest.

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), however, estimates that the company purchases between 20 percent and 30 percent of its fiber from logging companies operating in the boreal forest in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

According to the NRDC, Kimberly-Clark “relies on recycled sources for just 19 percent of the pulp it uses to make toilet paper, facial tissue, napkins and paper towels in North America.”

By comparison, Montreal-based Cascades by 2007 had met “96 percent of its pulp requirements with recycled fiber” and Vermont-based Seventh Generation uses 100 percent recycled consumer tissue products, according to the NRDC.