Gisele Bündchen Voted Best Green Celebrity
From left to right: Sir Paul McCartney, Gisele Bündchen, Miguel Bosé.
Supermodel Gisele Bündchen won the Best Green Celebrity Award at the recent International Green Award sixth annual gala held in London’s iconic Natural History Museum. The awards span 20 categories, honoring the best in business, citizen and government initiatives aimed at promoting sustainability around the globe.
For its first ever celebrity award, the Green Awards initiated a public on-line poll that resulted in Bündchen on a shortlist with Sir Paul McCartney and Latin superstar Miguel Bosé – all known for their environmental work. In winning, the Brazilian beauty was recognized for her efforts in the Amazon and Atlantic Rainforest where, with her family, she launched the Drop of Water movement and the Clean Water Project in 2008. Two years ago, she became a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program. Her interest in green issues began when she witnessed the effects of deforestation and water pollution in her native Brazil’s Xingu River, which led her to design a flip-flop line, with its proceeds going towards funding of environmental projects.
Unable to attend the gala, Bündchen thanked the public for their support via this video.
This year’s International Grand Prix Award, judged overall winner among all the entries, went to Unilever PLC for its ambitious Sustainable Living Plan. The global company – with over 400 brands including Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, Lipton, Dove Soap and Vaseline – proposes to “halve the environmental impact of our products, help more than a billion people improve their health and well-being and source 100 percent of our agricultural raw materials sustainably,” according to Karen Hamilton, Unilever’s VP for Sustainability. Past winners of the Grand Prix include China Environmental Protection Foundation, Keep Britain Tidy, Nokia, Honda and O2.
Notable among other awards, The Green Lifetime Achievement Award, given to a person who has dedicated her life to “looking after the planet and encouraging others to do the same,” was awarded posthumously to Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Professor Wangari Maathai, who died earlier this year.
Except for the Green Celebrity Award, categories are judged by an international panel of over 30 experts, who this year included Eden Project’s Tim Smit, journalist and environmentalist, Liu Jianquang, UNEP’s Nick Nutttall, on-line media maven, Ariana Huffington and explorer David de Rothschild.
View all the winners at International Green Awards
