Orang-utans have descended on Nestle’s London headquarters today, scaling the walls of the building in a protest over the company destroying their last few remaining habitats to make their various confectionery products.

This is not a mass migration of the simians from their home in Indonesia, rather the orang-utans that will be found on and around the building in Croydon are Greenpeace protesters appealing for the company to stop using palm oil that destroys great swathes of rainforest in being harvested.

The charity has organised this protest to coincide with a report that they have released today. This details Nestle’s use of palm oil, and how it is destroying the last rainforest habitat of the endangered orang-utan. The report explains how palm oil used in Nestle products has come from the biggest and most destructive palm oil producer – called the Sinar Mas Group.

Unilever, the world’s largest corporate palm oil buyer, recently dropped a large contract with one of the Sinar Mas Group’s subsidiary companies amid widespread pressure from conservation groups for the whole industry to halt the damage it is doing to key areas of land.

The Greenpeace report states that the Sinar Mas Group is illegally destroying the Indonesian rainforest and, by doing so, is not only wiping out habitat for wildlife, but also causing more climate changing emissions to be released.

The Group also owns Asia Pulp and Paper, the largest paper company in Indonesia, who are notorious for large scale deforestation in harvesting the material for their paper products.

While Kraft have joined Unilever in recently cancelling their dealings with the company, Nestle have refused to rule out buying either palm oil or paper products from the Sinar Mas Group.

Ian Duff, rainforests campaigner for Greenpeace, said: “Other big companies are acting to stop this, but Nestle is turning a blind eye to it and continuing to trade with a company that has done more than any other to wipe out the rainforests of Indonesia.”

Indonesia has one of the fastest rates of forest destruction in the world. It holds the world record for the fastest disappearing rainforest amongst all major forested nations on the planet. Since 1950, over 74 million hectares of Indonesia’s forests have been destroyed, with additional areas being severely degraded.

Every year 1.8 billion tonnes of climate changing greenhouse gas emissions are released by the degradation and burning of its peatlands alone. Such destruction has made Indonesia the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, after the US and China.

“Nestle products like KitKats contain palm oil from suppliers who are trashing rainforests and driving orang-utans to extinction,” said Duff.

And Nestle’s use of palm oil is rocketing. They use 320,000 tonnes every year, which is almost twice as much as they used three years ago. The scale of Nestle’s production is shown in arguably their most famous product, the Kitkat. Every five minutes, enough KitKats are produced that, stacked up, would be taller than the Eiffel Tower.

But Greenpeace is set to use the company’s most widely-known product against them in another part of the campaign that is set to be launched today.

A video will be released today showing an unwitting office worker taking a break to enjoy a KitKat, but instead chomping into an orang-utan finger.

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