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Magnum Singapore ‘haze-free days ahead’ tweet raises eyebrows over palm oil sourcing

Magnum tweetUnilever has raised eyebrows with a promotion for ice cream brand Magnum that toasts ‘haze-free days ahead’ in Singapore.

Unilever is one of the world’s largest buyers of palm oil, an industry that is ravaging neighbouring Indonesia’s rainforests and is a cause of the haze, annual air pollution from burning peat land to make way for plantations to produce the palm oil used in Unilever products.

Mumbrella was alerted to the promotion by a reader who described the promotion on Twitter this morning as an “epic fail.”

“A product containing palm oil using the haze to advertise. What sort of sick joke is this?! An epic fail by Unilever,” they wrote in an email.

Unilever is seen as one of the greenest of the big palm oil buyers. The company has pledged to source all of its palm oil from sustainable sources by 2020. But currently only a fraction of its palm oil is sourced from sustainably managed forests.

A campaign is underway in Singapore, led by green group WWF, to pressure more companies such as Unilever to convert to sustainable palm oil sources.

The campaign, which launched in July, has a target of 50,000 signatures urging companies to stop using unsustainably sourced palm oil. The campaign has prompted 9,714 pledges at the time of publishing.

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