Greenpeace - Making Waves: Anita Roddick: back to the earth

September 11, 2007

Anita Roddick: back to the earth

Posted by Brian at 11:30 AM

Anita Roddick, environmental actvist and founder of the Body Shop, died yesterday at the age of 64 of a brain hemorrhage.

Anita was the living proof that a business could do well by doing good. She drove her shops to reduce packaging, giving a discount for refills, shunned product testing methods involving animals, and used her highly aligned customer base as an activist force for dozens of causes, from saving the whales to introducting green energy.

John Sauven of Greenpeace UK called Roddick an ``incredible woman'' who would be ``sorely missed.''

``She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done in different ways, not just profit motivated but taking into account environmental issues,'' Sauven said.

``When you look at it today, and how every company claims to be green, she was living this decades ago,'' he added.

The world needs more of what Anita stood for.