Police Respond to Protest at P&G Conference Downtown

Procter & Gamble’s annual Signal Summit was disrupted when four climate protesters locked themselves down in the outer lobby of the company’s Cincinnati headquarters on July 17, according to a press release from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

The demonstrators chained themselves to soundboxes playing audio from Indonesian forests in order to call out P&G’s “failure to address its role in driving the destruction of climate-critical forests around the world,” the release says.

Shawna Ambrose, RAN’s communications manager, told CityBeat that four protesters were arrested.

“Police responded with a heavy presence and had to call other agencies to unlock people who were bound by chains to lock boxes,” Ambrose said in a text.

RAN posted about the protest on their Instagram and X accounts, saying the demonstration was their “SIGNAL to P&G to clean up their act.”

P&G told CityBeat in an email that “several individuals entered our outer lobby today without an appointment or authorization,” and that they were “arrested by Cincinnati Police after repeated requests to leave private property.”

Signal is P&G’s annual innovation summit hosted at the company’s headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. The summit brings together industry leaders to “share insights and strategies for driving market growth and value creation in today’s unpredictable global business environment,” according to the Signal 2024 website.

This year’s conference was said to host founders and executives from Walmart, YouTube, Amazon, The New York Times and more.

“The impacted communities, who have been working to keep their forests standing for decades, have called on us all to step up and be bold in the face of destruction and climate chaos,” said demonstrator and Cincinnati resident Midavi Hayden. “As a long-time resident of Cincinnati where P&G is headquartered, it's clear to me that we are all connected in this fight. I want to do what I can to hold P&G accountable and demand that it respects communities’ rights and ends the deforestation it's connected to around the world.”

P&G is a large consumer of commodities that contribute to deforestation, such as palm oil, tree pulp and paper. This year, the World Wildlife Fund found that P&G purchased 453,890 metric tons of palm oil.

P&G’s practices have drawn criticism for many years from environmental and human rights activists , Cincinnati residents and the descendants of P&G co-founders William Procter and James Gamble.

RAN says P&G sources materials from suppliers that “the company knows are causing serious human suffering and environmental harm.”

P&G’s supply chain connects it to PT Toba Pulp Lestari, a controversial pulp and paper company that’s been operating on Batak Indigenous lands in North Sumatra, Indonesia, without their consent. Pargamanan-Bintang Maria, an impacted community, is at risk of deforestation indefinitely, according to RAN.

On P&G’s website, the company says, in part, “we are committed to responsible sourcing of key commodities like wood pulp, palm oil and paper packaging together with respecting human, labor and land tenure rights in our supply chains.”