TBI claims to be a ‘Go Green’ company, and it runs competitions for the kiddies on this theme, but like everyone thing else about these people, these claims turn out to be hollow. In fact in 2011, about 10 months before leaving TBI, I learned that Jalaludin Japri- who is one of the two surviving owners of TBI Kelapa Gading- is heavily involved in the palm-oil industry. I rarely got an email for this guy, but when I did it was from a palm-oil plantation company called Teladan Prima. 

Environmentalists will be depressed to learn that Teladan Prima own thousands of hectares of palm-oil plantations in East Kalimantan- a part of the world better known outside Indonesia as Borneo. The island faces horrendous deforestation and is known as an extinction hotspot. Greenpeace and other environmental groups have been trying to do save the orangutan whose habitat is only in Sumatra and Borneo. But every year more and more habitat is being destroyed and the orangutan is critically endangered. The main reason they are losing their habitat is to perkebunan kelapa sawit (palm oil plantations)

Teladan Prima along with 2 other despoilers of orangutan habitat have signed some kind of memorandum promising to be more careful in future about killing orangutans when they deforest Borneo. (See the previous press clippings from the Indonesian press.) This is all very well but it surely a worry that they weren’t being careful in the past. And the orangutan needs a massive amount of territory to search for its varied diet, so even if they don’t actively try and kill orangutans when ‘opening up’ the jungle, the loss of habitat is already a pressing enough stress. Habitat loss is one of the main reasons why this magnificent creature is so threatened. We will never forget the wonderful experience we had seeing orangutans in Tanjung Puting, Indonesia’s best preserved national park, in 2005.

So next time TBI runs some half-baked ‘Go Green’ themed event, know that the real truth is that Japri, the owner of one TBI branch, is high up in Teladan Prima, who has actually clearly vast areas of jungle for plantations. There isn’t one bit of truth to their ‘we are green’ claims.