ENVIRONMENT BRIEFS
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Office Depot’s commitment to
southern forests falls short

By Shawn Gaynor

Asheville, North Carolina, Apr. 23 (AGR)—Office product supplier Office Depot, which has been receiving pressure to commit to standards of environmental responsibility, announced on Apr. 22, that they would meet some of the environmental community’s demands. However, activists charge that the announcement, which coincided with Earth Day is a publicity ruse, and falls well short of environmental standards enacted last year by industry leader Staples.

“Office Depot has initiated steps to reduce the negative impacts that its suppliers, the timber industry, have on southern forests and communities,” said Jason Halbert of the Dogwood Alliance Board of Directors. “But the ‘devil is in the details’ and this policy falls short in several key areas, most importantly the protection of endangered forests.”

Operating over 1000 stores in the US, with $11 billion in annual sales, Office Depot rivals Staples as a retail giant, allowing it influence over paper industry production.

“We are very disappointed in Office Depot’s decision not to protect endangered southern forests, including US public lands, through their new paper purchasing policy,” said Tracy Davis of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project (SABP). “Until Office Depot develops a purchasing policy that is as strong as Staples, we will continue to keep the pressure on them.”

Encouraged by last year’s victory over office supply retailer Staples, southern forest protection groups, including the Dogwood Alliance and SABP, have targeted industry rivals Office Max and Office Depot, challenging them to meet or beat Staples’ commitment to strengthening its environmental policies. The campaign’s intent is to persuade office supply retailers to commit to making changes in the paper they offer to consumers by including recycled post-consumer paper products and refusing products that originate from federal public lands, and to make a commitment to phase out paper products produced from endangered forests.

After over 600 protests against Staples nationwide, the company committed to including 30 percent post-consumer product in its office paper and phasing out paper produced from endangered forests. This included a recognition of the coastal forests of the Carolinas and the Cumberland Plateau area as endangered forest ecosystems.

“If we had the same commitment from all the paper industry we would be saving 1.7 million acres a year of southern forests. But we are a long way out from an industry shift now,” said Kelly Sheehan, national campaign organizer with the Dogwood Alliance. “We are trying to create an industry-wide shift to reduce the demand for the products.”

The campaign represents a shift in forest defense strategy for groups like Dogwood Alliance, away from legislation and challenging specific timber sales or mills, towards pressuring the retailers whose buying power drives production standards at large paper producers.

“This is putting the responsibility on the companies such as Office Max and Office Depot that are making millions of dollars every year off the profits from forest destruction,” Sheehan continued. “If these companies want to make money and have a successful business, then they need to consider environmental impacts, and it is their responsibility to be accountable for the destruction they are causing.”

The group is responding to an industry climate that shows a growing demand for office paper products. This they fear will lead to further stress on already devastated southern forests.

In recent years the southeastern US has emerged as the world’s leading paper producing region, producing 25 percent of paper products worldwide and two-thirds of the paper in the United States. This has lead to five million acres of southern forest, an area roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, being clear cut each year for paper production.

Environmentalists point out that the threat to southern forests is compounded by replanting much of the logged land in “tree farms,” where single species crops replace healthy ecosystems.

“We are the breadbasket of the pulp and paper industry. As a result we are seeing southern native forests converted into monoculture pine plantations, so we are losing important ecosystems for the production of disposable paper products,” said Davis.

“Nine out of ten species that exist in a native forest do not exist after a transition to a pine plantation,” said Allen Hershowitz, Senior Scientist for the Natural Resource Defense Council.

The staggering species diversity of the Southern Appalachian forest and the swift rate of deforestation has lead many in the scientific community to list it as one of the endangered ecosystems of the world.

“The Southern Appalachian forests exceed the Everglades in both diversity and threats,” asserted Hershowitz, who pointed out that demand for office paper is projected to double in the next 15 years, leading to further pressures on southern forests.

Though the campaign is expected to slow destruction of southern forests, Dogwood Alliance recognizes that it will take more to ensure the legacy of these areas will be safe for future generations.

“We have a vision of a time when we don’t need to have stores like Office Max and Office Depot at all. The vision of Dogwood Alliance is a time when we have small communities that are supporting each other and where we have local-based economies. We see this as a step towards reforming corporations, to bringing us back to an awareness of the planet, and the earth around us, and each other,” Sheehan concluded.

So far over 40 protests have taken place at Office Max and Office Depot stores.

On Thursday, Apr. 24, Dogwood Alliance, with local allies SABP and Katuah Earth First!, plan to bring their message to Office Max and Office Depot, on Tunnel Road in Asheville. At 1pm the groups will gather at Office Max with concerned people from thoughout the area to demand that the stores commit to offering recycled paper products and stop selling paper from endangered forests.

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