Recipients to return 'Green' award back to PTT
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SOME OF THE country's leading environmentalists plan to return their Green Globe Awards to state energy firm PTT today to protest against the company's handling of an oil leak from a PTT Global Chemical offshore platform near Rayong on Saturday.
Thaithong Thongthai, who received the award from the energy giant in 2003, created the Facebook page “Return Green Globe Award to PTT” on Wednesday.
In a post on the page, he said he would be ashamed to be used as a tool by the firm to promote what he called its false love for the environment. Therefore, he said, he would today return the trophy to the firm today.
Also on Facebook, other award-winning environmentalists declared their intention to return their awards. They include Dr Rungsrit Kanjanavanit, who posted that he would return his 2007 Green Globe Award to PTT today.
Rungsrit, a lecturer at Chiang Mai University’s medical school, posted on his Facebook page that he refused to be part of PTT’s green propaganda.
“CSR [corporate social responsibility programmes] are just for the sake of PR, not for delivering real solutions, so [I] decided to return the award to PTT,” he told The Nation.
The decision to hand back the award was entirely his own, he said.
He apologised to former prime minister Anand Panyarachun and the PTT Green Globe award committee, which backed him to receive |the award, saying they had done some good work because some groups |benefited from receiving the award.
While he had decided to hand back the award to PTT, he said he was reluctant to over-dramatise the issue, which he said would serve no purpose other than making people involved look bad.
Acharawadee Buaklee, former editor of the now-defunct Ponlamuang Nua newspaper, who received the Green Globe Award |in 2007 in the mass-media category, posted on her Facebook page that |she agreed with Rungsrit’s reasoning and would also return her award to PTT.
She said she would send her award to Rungsrit so that he could return it along with his own.
