Stop Destroying the Planet & Shop Responsibly

"As a concerned consumer, I can only do so much when making my purchasing decisions. Ultimately, the responsibility is Stop&Shop’s, so I hope the CEO can make the decision to cut ties with Cargill in an effort to create a more sustainable future for our planet."

- Victoria Deever | Stop & Shop Customer, MA

The meat industry is the leading cause of water pollution and deforestation. A small handful of companies control the meat industry and are responsible for its impact.

Community members are asking Stop & Shop to ensure that shelves are stocked with products from responsible suppliers that are taking care of our environment.

This spring community members took the following actions: 

by Mighty Earth

Activists Stage Protest at Tyson Shareholder Meeting over Sustainability Concerns

by Mighty Earth

Mighty Earth endorses open letter to end child labor in US agriculture

Mighty Earth endorsed an open letter led by the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), of which we are a member, to end child labor in US agriculture. We are proud to support the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, H.R. 3394. The legislation has been endorsed by 150 organizations.

This is a crucial bill. Between 400,000 and 500,000 children are working in the US farming industry, often exposed to pesticides and routinely exploited. Child labor is not only an issue Mighty Earth campaigns against in cocoa and other tropical commodities. In US agriculture it remains a real, lasting problem – one that makes it harder to eradicate this problem worldwide, given the influence of the US on global trends, laws, and policies.

In the USA, children as young as 12 work in fields as many as 12 hours a day, six months a year. There is no maximum number of hours worked a day, aside from being outside of school hours. Kids are exposed to the sun, harmful pesticides, hazardous conditions, and dangerous work – which frequently threatens their health and lives. Children can experience up to three times greater dangers from exposure to pesticides than adults, due to their size and stage of development. The fatality rate is six times that in any other industry: children account for 20% of all deaths on US farms.

Agriculture is a hazardous occupation, but no statistics are maintained on US child laborers and serious accidents. Children who work on farms spend on average 30 hours a week, even during times of the year when school is in session. Of the children who work on US farms, 50% of them will not graduate from high school. Many are doomed to poverty. The United States Department of Labor estimates that children earn about $1,000 per year. The agriculture industry is subject to more lenient labor laws than any other occupation in the United States, and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has different standards for children working in agriculture than in any other industry.

If passed, this law would protect all children working in US agriculture, changing hundreds of thousands of lives. Farmworkers provide essential services to the nation, often at great risk to themselves, making sacrifices for others, to keep people well-fed. It is time to stop treating them as expendable.

This is also a personal matter for Mighty Earth. Our colleague Kristin Urquiza’s four grandparents were migrant farmworkers along with her father, aunts, and uncles who worked in the fields as children before school and in the summer until they graduated from high school. These courageous men and women shaped Kristin’s future with their sacrifices, giving her the opportunities that enriched her life, and have enabled her to become an advocate today for some of the most vulnerable workers in agriculture.

Mighty Earth is signing on to this letter to honor Kristin’s grandparents and all those like them who put the food on our tables.

by Mighty Earth

Tyson: Keep Your Promise

One year ago, Tyson Foods announced it would begin implementing its critically important commitment to improve farming practices on 2 million acres of U.S. corn used in animal feed by 2020. Mighty Earth subsequently decided to halt its campaign urging Tyson to clean up water pollution caused by its vast animal feed supply chain, recognizing that change takes time.

Mighty Earth’s investigations into corporate pledges to end deforestation by 2020 have found an alarming lack of follow-through, with companies continuing to fund suppliers known to be burning forests around the world. However, since its announcement, Tyson has provided no further detail or reporting on its commitment. At a time when the public is rightly skeptical of corporate sustainability initiatives that accountability or visible action, such silence is unacceptable.

As Tyson’s 2020 deadline approaches, it is critical that the company report on its progress toward improving farming practices for U.S corn.

Today, on the anniversary of its much-publicized commitment, we are calling on Tyson to provide a public update with concrete information that includes: the locations and total number of acres engaged, the practices implemented and environmental outcomes achieved for those acres (with a particular focus on reducing nutrient runoff), and specific methods for tracking and verifying environmental improvements. This information is necessary for customers, employees, local communities, and shareholders to know where and how Tyson is delivering on its sustainability promise.

Tyson Foods has a long track record as one of the most polluting companies in America. Overcoming this reputation will require transparency and clear evidence of verifiable changes that are reported to the public.

Join us in urging Tyson to keep its promise, sign the petition!

by Mighty Earth

Groundbreaking Resolution Calling on NYC to Divest from Deforestation

Last week, City Council Members Costa Constantinides and Justin Brannan, in partnership with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, introduced a new resolution to City Council that calls on corporate and government entities operating in the City of New York to divest from agricultural industries that benefit form deforestation and the acceleration of global warming. Mighty Earth is encouraged by the introduction of this resolution as its enforcement would have an enormously positive impact on vulnerable ecosystems across the world, especially if adopted on the national scale.

As forests burn from the Arctic to the Amazon and Southeast Asia, the public is demanding action on the global climate crisis and are pressuring governments and companies alike to protect the world’s forests. Companies like Costco, Ahold Delhaize, and Costco must stop funding the destruction of forests by purchasing meat and soy animal feed from Cargill, Bunge, and JBS.

by Mighty Earth

Meat Company Pollution to Blame for New, Near-Record “Dead Zone” Forecast

On the heels of the official NOAA forecast that predicts a near-record size “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico this summer, environmental campaign organization Mighty Earth is laying the blame at the feet of America’s biggest meat companies.

“In 2018, JBS was responsible for generating 80 million tons of raw sewage – and that’s just what we know about. Dumping that much manure and slaughterhouse waste into our waters is clearly a major threat to our health and downstream prosperity, but the new forecast shows just how disastrous and out of hand the industry’s pollution has become,” said Mighty Earth Campaign Director Lucia von Reusner. “The environmental catastrophe is rivalled only by the economic damage this will do to the Gulf economies later this year.”

A recent Mighty Earth analysis showed that America’s largest meat companies have built slaughterhouses and processing facilities in flood-prone areas throughout the Mississippi River Basin while failing to develop and implement practices to protect water quality. As a result, 145 million tons of untreated animal waste and other pollutants washed freely off industrial farms into the Mississippi River watershed in 2018, endangering local water quality and ultimately contributing to the toxic algal blooms fueling the annual Gulf dead zone.

Agricultural giant JBS, responsible for 80 million tons of pollution in 2018, was the top polluter identified in the analysis, while Cargill and Tyson were the most vulnerable to flooding. Polluted runoff from fields producing the vast quantities of animal feed used by these companies is another major source of water contamination causing the dead zone.

“Given the climate-fueled extreme flooding washing more and more pollution downstream, it would not be surprising if this is ultimately the largest-ever dead zone,” von Reusner said.

NOAA’s official forecast predicts a hypoxic zone of 7,829 square miles. However, researchers at Louisiana State University who contributed to NOAA’s model predict – with a 95 percent confidence interval – an area between 7,889 and 9,583 square miles. The largest ever recorded to date was in 2017, with a dead zone of 8,776 square miles.

“JBS and the other meat companies have gotten away with their reckless practices for so long because the chain of cause and effect is as long as the Mississippi River,” said von Reusner. “But the connection between uncontrolled runoff from industrial farms and the dead zone is clear – and the results are disastrous. It’s time for industrial meat companies to be held accountable for the unacceptable levels of pollution flushed downstream year after year: they must immediately move to implement protections for America’s water.”

by Mighty Earth

Analysis: Spring Floods Exacerbate Raw Sewage from Factory Farms Washing into Gulf of Mexico

The facilities of these corporate factory farms produce more sewage waste than some major U.S. cities, and this waste contains a variety of toxins and pathogens dangerous to human health including manure, nitrates, hydrogen sulfide, lead, E. coli, antibiotic resistant bacteria, growth hormones, and more.  Unlike human waste however, sewage from factory farms is not required to be treated before it is released into the surrounding environment. Common methods of disposing of sewage from factory farms are to spread the waste on surrounding crop fields, store it in massive open earthen pits prone to overflow or leaking, or discharge it directly into nearby waterways. Precipitation events like rain or snow then wash this waste downstream, contaminating drinking water across the Midwest with harmful toxins and creating dead zones fueled by toxic algae blooms in major watersheds like the Gulf of Mexico each summer.

While uncontrolled pollution from the meat industry has been a long-standing threat to our waterways, catastrophic floods exacerbated by climate change and the destruction of natural landscape buffers are increasingly turning America’s agricultural regions into open sewers filled in part by the meat industry’s waste. Last fall, Hurricane Florence devastated North Carolina as manure lagoons filled with hog waste overflowed across the landscape. This spring, unprecedented flooding swept the Midwest- the heart of the meat industry’s supply chain. As a result, NOAA has already issued predictions that the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused largely by the meat industry’s run-off pollution washing down the Mississippi River, is going to be larger than the annual average. The bulk of the meat industry’s pollution comes from the vast quantities of feed required to raise livestock and poultry, which was the focus of Mighty Earth’s Mystery Meat II report.

The meat industry is highly consolidated, with a small handful of companies controlling between 60-90% of poultry, pork, and beef markets. These companies are responsible for the bulk of the industry’s impacts, yet can drive massive improvements at scale by changing farming practices in their supply chains. Recognizing that climate change is worsening while demand for meat is rising, Mighty Earth is leading a global campaign calling on the world’s largest food companies to require more sustainable farming practices that reduce the environmental devastation from industrial meat production.  You can see more about our work here.

by Mighty Earth

Despite Shareholder Concerns, Pilgrim’s Pride Turns a Blind Eye to Water Pollution … Again

Concerned shareholders submitted a resolution at Pilgrim’s Pride’s annual meeting today urging the Board of Directors to adopt and implement a water stewardship policy designed to reduce risks of contamination at all facilities in Pilgrim Pride’s supply chain. Pilgrim’s Pride has refused to take any action, declining to meet with the concerned shareholders and declining to respond to letters voicing concerns about water pollution from Mighty Earth.

Pilgrim’s Pride is one of the largest poultry producers in the United States. A subsidiary of JBS, the largest meat company in the world, Pilgrim’s Pride claims to produce 1 out of every 5 chickens in the United States. Their massive production comes with serious pollution: In 2018 alone, JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride produced over 159 billion pounds of manure - 1.6 billion pounds of which came from Pilgrim’s Pride’s poultry division, and the EPA’s toxic release inventory shows Pilgrim’s Pride discharged 16973640 lbs of water polluting toxins from its facilities 2012-2017.

“The meat industry is responsible for widespread and worsening water pollution throughout the country. Chemicals and manure wash off fields and slaughterhouse floors, contaminating our rivers and oceans and even the water we drink. This year, unprecedented flooding and storms across the Midwest have only exacerbated the environmental and public health risks of the meat industry’s polluting practices,” said Mighty Earth Campaign Director Lucia von Reusner. “Shareholders are right to pressure Pilgrim’s Pride to clean up the water pollution throughout their poultry supply chain.”

“Shareholders of Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation will again be filing a resolution asking the company to improve disclosure on managing water contamination related risks by reporting on how the company is responding to increasing regulatory, public and competitive pressure to significantly reduce water pollution from the company’s owned facilities; facilities under contract; and suppliers,” said Anne Falkenberg, a member of the Socially Responsible Investment Coalition. “We believe that that the company in doing so will benefit by creating policies needed to govern sustainable and responsible operations and reducing material risks to business, brand and potential growth.”

Pilgrim’s Pride is ranked as a top corporate water polluter in the United States, based on an evaluation of EPA-reported toxic releases into waterways from their slaughterhouses, the vast quantities of manure generated by their poultry, and the pollution that washes off the industrial crop fields in the company’s supply chain.

Over 7 million Americans are exposed to carcinogenic nitrates in drinking water from industrial agriculture. According to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, Pilgrim’s Pride released on average over 2.7 million pounds of pollutants, mostly nitrates and ammonia, from slaughterhouses into waterways between 2012 and 2017. Yet the company lacks any policies, contracts or codes that address water quality.

In contrast to Pilgrim’s Pride’s inaction, competitors have begun taking steps to reduce pollution in their supply chains. Just in the past year, Smithfield set a target to purchase 75 percent of its grain from farms managed to reduce water pollution, and Tyson Foods has made a commitment to implement sustainable farming practices on 2 million acres of U.S. corn by the end of 2020.

“Ensuring sustainable farming practices are used in producing food is something that consumers, shareholders, and the public increasingly expect from their favorite brands,” said von Reusner. “As more and more of their competitors outpace them in this area, it’s not surprising that Pilgrim’s Pride is hearing from its shareholders. I expect these calls for action will only get louder.”

by Mighty Earth

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey Stumbles on Sustainability

“It’s an impossible request…if we tried to do it we would ruin our business and go bankrupt”

That’s what Whole Foods CEO James Mackey said when asked how his company can address sustainability standards throughout its supply chain. At a conversation hosted by the Texas Tribune, John Mackey was asked what Whole Foods was doing to address its supply chain’s climate impact.

His answer: “We have literally tens of thousands of suppliers to our company. I always think it’s unfair to ask a business to hold absolutely every one of its suppliers up to some sort of activist standard…I cannot account for the probably 30,000 suppliers we deal with. It’s an impossible request…”

Watch the full exchange:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZxERAzRhFw&feature=youtu.be

Video by The Texas Tribune . This video has been edited for length. You can view the full interview here.

But companies setting standards for their suppliers is far from unfair or impossible – it’s a common, effective tactic for making change. Consider:

• Walmart and Tesco have supply-chain-wide greenhouse gas reduction targets that hold their suppliers accountable for reducing greenhouse gas emissions – exactly what Mr. Mackey was asked about.
• Despite Mr. Mackey’s claims, Whole Foods does in fact set “activist” standards for its suppliers (see, for example, its animal welfare guidelines).
• The Whole Foods brand is built on customers’ trust that they are buying high quality, healthy, and sustainable food from responsible suppliers.

Whole Foods has, quite simply, fallen behind on this point. While its competitors address their climate impacts down to the individual farm level, Whole Foods does not appear to have made progress on (or updated) its 2012 greenhouse gas commitment, which only applied to its own operations. And it continues to buy meat from some of the most polluting companies in America, including Tyson Foods and the same suppliers that sell to McDonald’s.

Mighty Earth has called on Whole Foods to set clear environmental standards for its meat, requiring its suppliers to reduce water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Over 160,000 customers have signed petitions urging Mr. Mackey to set environmental standards for the meat Whole Foods sells, yet this dismissive comment has been the company’s only response.

You can see background materials on Mighty Earth’s campaign here and here, as well as an op-ed published in the Texas Tribune in June. I am also happy to put you in touch with Lucia von Reusner, Mighty Earth’s US Agriculture Campaign Director, if you have any questions.

by Mighty Earth

Shareholders Push Tyson on Water Pollution

Tyson’s track record as one of the nation’s top water polluters is once again coming under fire from shareholders at the company’s annual meeting this year. Concerned about the negative impacts on workers, farmers, and communities, as well as the risks to Tyson’s ability to do business in the face of public scrutiny, shareholders are pushing the company to adopt and implement a water stewardship policy to mitigate the chronic water pollution being caused by its supply chain (full details of the concerns can be found here).

This is the fourth consecutive year Tyson Foods is facing a shareholder proposal concerned about the company’s water pollution, with last year’s proposal receiving support from 63 percent of non-family shareowners. The latest shareholder memo highlights a litany of fines the company has faced for violating clean water regulations, growing public backlash from communities where Tyson is seeking to do business, the public health consequences for workers and community members exposed to water contamination from Tyson’s supply chain, and the risks to Tyson’s brand and customer trust resulting from controversies concerning water pollution.

Last year, Tyson announced a commitment to improve farming practices on two million acres of grains in the U.S. by 2020 and recently released a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund to begin piloting this commitment on 500,000 acres. While an ambitious and important goal, Tyson to date still has not released specific details on how this on-paper commitment will translate into real improvements on the ground. Meanwhile, the company appears to be operating business as usual while water pollution continues to leach from its supply chain. In a recent report from the Environmental Integrity Project, Tyson was found to have the most processing plants operating in chronic violations of clean water regulations, with 26 plants found in violation of their monthly water pollution limits between January 2016 and June 2018.

Investor and public concern about the uncontrolled environmental devastation caused by meat is on the rise. Last week, over 80 global investors representing more than $6.5 trillion sent letters to six fast food companies that buy large quantities of meat, asking them to set clear environmental requirements for their meat suppliers to reduce water and greenhouse gas pollution. Walmart, which is Tyson’s single largest customer, has set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals for its supply chain through Project Gigaton, which call for supplier compliance.

In addition to water pollution, the farming practices throughout the Tyson supply chain are a major contributor to climate emissions. Given that the limited window that climate scientists have assessed to curb emissions and avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, addressing the impacts of meat production are a vital part of our response to this crisis. Producing meat has a larger environmental impact than nearly any other human activity, with the top meat and dairy producers – including Tyson – ranked alongside the largest oil companies as top corporate contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

by Mighty Earth

Global Investors Push Fast Food Giants to Cut Meat’s Environmental Impact

A coalition of more than 80 global investors representing more than $6.5 trillion has sent letters to six of the world’s largest fast food companies urging action to reduce environmental devastation caused by their meat. In dispatches sent to McDonald’s, Yum! Brands, Restaurant Brands International, Chipotle, Wendy’s, and Domino’s Pizza, the investors cite concerns about the financial and reputational risks to companies that fail to reduce the greenhouse gas, water, and land impacts of their meat, and highlight steps the companies need to take to reduce these risks.

“It is clear that the public is waking up to the environmental devastation caused by the meat industry,” said Lucia von Reusner, Campaign Director for Mighty Earth. “The private sector has an obligation to act responsibly, and investors understand that burning the planet to produce meat is not a good long-term business strategy.”

Meat production has a larger environmental impact than nearly any other human activity, and the top meat and dairy companies are responsible for widespread water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions nearly equal to the largest oil companies. Mighty Earth has released several reports documenting the environmental devastation caused by the largest meat companies, like Tyson and Cargill, and highlighted opportunities to reduce these impacts through more sustainable farming practices for sourcing feed and managing manure.

The investor letters call on the fast food companies – who represent more than 120,000 restaurants around the world – to set requirements for their suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, address freshwater impacts, and report regularly on progress toward these goals.

Mighty Earth is leading a campaign to build public pressure on major meat companies like Tyson and Cargill to adopt policies to stop deforestation and reduce water pollution caused by their meat supply chains. Food companies that buy large quantities of meat have significant influence over the supply chain, yet a recent analysis from Mighty Earth found most food companies – including supposedly ‘green’ sellers like Whole Foods – have no policies to ensure their meat suppliers are using environmentally responsible practices.

“Customers are increasingly looking for more sustainable food options and expect their favorite brands to be using responsible suppliers, not directing their dollars to top environmental polluters like Tyson and Cargill,” von Reusner said. “Food companies have set requirements to address issues like antibiotic overuse and animal welfare in the meat industry, and now it’s time to require environmental protections as well.”

by Mighty Earth