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Anita Roddick, who died yesterday at 64, stamped "green" on the business world long before it was fashionable.
Roddick, the British founder of beauty-products retailer Body Shop International and a longtime environmental activist, announced in February that she had hepatitis C.
Her family said yesterday that she died of a brain haemorrhage in Chichester, West Sussex.
She opened her first Body Shop store in 1976. Today the chain has more than 2100 stores in 55 countries.
Roddick sold the company to L'Oreal, the world's largest cosmetics maker, last year in a deal valued at $1.2 billion.
"She changed the world of business with her campaigns for social and environmental responsibility," said Body Shop chairman Adrian Bellamy.
She encouraged customers to return their plastic bottles for refills and used natural ingredients such as bananas, mangoes and tea-tree oil in her products. She opposed animal testing and joined forces with environmental groups such as Greenpeace.
"The frugality that my mother exercised during the war years made me question retail conventions," Roddick said in an autobiography on her website. "Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use?
"We behaved as she did in World War II, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could. The foundation of The Body Shop's environmental activism was born out of ideas like these."
Roddick was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2003.
"She campaigned for green issues for many years before it became fashionable to do so and inspired millions to the cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said yesterday.
Roddick managed to be economically successful while also remaining focused on social and environmental rights, said John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace.
Many "saw her as an eccentric, but her ideas of 20-30 years ago are so mainstream now", Sauven said.
Roddick was born in the seaside town of Littlehampton in 1942, the child of an Italian immigrant couple. She said her strong sense of moral outrage stemmed from a book she read about the Holocaust at age 10. She trained as a teacher and a stint on a kibbutz in Israel turned into a working trip around the world.
When she returned to England, her mother introduced her to Scotsman Gordon Roddick. The couple ran a hotel and a restaurant in Littlehampton. They were married in 1970.
Roddick said she contracted hepatitis through a blood transfusion when she gave birth to her daughter Sam in 1971. "I could still have a good few years, even decades, of life left but it's hard to say," she said in February. "I could be facing liver cancer tomorrow. It makes me even more determined to just get on with things."
She is survived by her husband and their daughters, Sam and Justine.
Bloomberg
