Tropicana Incentive Helps Preserve Rainforests

People can help protect rainforests in a new cause campaign from Tropicana.

Tropicana, the company that grinds its orange rinds into animal feed, is playing to American’s green sensibilities by encouraging people to purchase its products to help protect endangered rainforests.

The initiative is in partnership with Cool Earth, an international trust dedicated to protecting rainforests, which are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Throughout the year, specially marked packages of Tropicana Pure Premium and Trop50 products will carry a code that consumers can enter online.

For each code entered, 100 square feet of rainforest will be protected. Once registered, consumers can enter additional codes with each purchase and increase the area of rainforest they have rescued. People can participate as individuals or in groups.

With the funds, Cool Earth plans to put land from the forest into a local trust. To see how their efforts are working, participants can go to Google Maps, register and watch the area of rainforest being saved grow. Funds from the campaign zero in on Peru’s Ashaninka Corridor, along an arc of deforestation that is being routinely cleared and burned, the companies said.

On average, an area roughly the size of Los Angeles disappears every month. The destruction of rainforest is a major source of greenhouse gases and a driver of climate change, the company said.

Earlier this year, Tropicana became the first consumer brand in North America to independently certify the carbon footprint of several of its products, beginning with the Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice. The certification by Carbon Trust gave PepsiCo a benchmark to measure greenhouse gas reduction in the production of its products.

Tropicana is a division of PepsiCo.