Campaign tergets Boise, Office Max
On July 14, Boise Cascade Corporation announced its acquisition of OfficeMax. As a result, Boise Office Solutions, the company’s office products distribution business, will more than double in size to approximately $8.3 billion annually, making it the third largest paper retailer in the United States. Unlike Home Depot, Kinko’s, Staples, and Lowe’s, neither Boise nor OfficeMax have policies protecting the world’s last remaining old growth and endangered forests, either in the US or internationally.
The Paper Campaign has challenged both companies to utilize this opportunity to protect the environment, and demands OfficeMax stop purchasing paper from the world’s endangered forests such as the Canadian Boreal forests, the forests of the American Southeast, and Indonesia’s rainforests. The Paper Campaign also demands OfficeMax dramatically increase the post-consumer recycled content for paper it sells to minimum average of 30 percent post consumer waste.
OfficeMax’s suppliers include International Paper and Georgia-Pacific, the two largest culprits in the wholesale conversion of native forests into monocultural pine plantations throughout the Southeast United States. Especially endangered are the coastal forests of North Carolina, the Cumberland Plateau (in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama), and the national forests in Mississippi. OfficeMax’s suppliers are active in the destruction of Indonesia’s pristine forests and Canada’s Boreal forest. (thepapercampaign.com)

Coca-Cola’s ‘toxic’ India fertilizer
Waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertilizer for local farmers contains toxic chemicals, a BBC study has found.
Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala.
Vice-President of Coca-Cola in India, Sunil Gupta, denied the fertilizer posed any risk.
“We have scientific evidence to prove it is absolutely safe and we have never had any complaints,” Gupta said.
Villagers, politicians, environmentalists, and scientists say the area’s farming industry has been devastated and jobs, as well as the health of local people, have been put at risk.
According to Britain’s leading poisons expert, Professor John Henry, consultant at St Mary’s Hospital in London, immediate steps should be taken by the authorities in India to ban the practice immediately.
The levels of toxins found in the samples would, he said, cause serious problems - polluting the land, local water supplies, and the food chain.
Cadmium is a carcinogen and can accumulate in the kidneys, with repeated exposure possibly causing kidney failure.
Lead is particularly dangerous to children and the results of exposure can be fatal. Even at low levels it can cause mental retardation and severe anaemia.
Gupta said local farmers had been grateful for the fertilizer because many could not afford brand-name products of their own.
“It’s good for crops,” he said. “It’s good for the farmers because most of them are poor and they have been using this for the past three years.”
Coca-Cola say they will continue to supply the sludge to farmers. (BBC)

Bush global warming plan a stall
The Bush administration has announced a new ten-year plan to study the ”uncertainty” around global climate change — instead of taking action to fix it, scientists and environmentalists say.
Eight years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), involving more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries, agreed that human-produced emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily from burning oil, coal, and natural gas, were changing the planet’s climate.
Given the enormous ramifications, most countries, including the United States under Pres. Bill Clinton, signed on to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which commits countries in the North to small reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.
However, not long after taking power, Bush withdrew from Kyoto and backed away from campaign promises to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Bush argued that reducing emissions of fossil fuels would cost too much, and that the science around the causes and impacts of climate change were too uncertain.
An outline of the goals and objectives of the 10-year plan is contained in the 330-page “US Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan.” It is intended to bring together expertise from 13 federal agencies that are spending $4.5 billion per year on programs that touch on climate change.
Under “CCSP Priorities” the plan lists “three broad sets of scientific uncertainties: atmospheric distributions and effects of aerosols; climate feedbacks and sensitivity, initially focusing on polar feedbacks; and carbon sources and sinks, focusing particularly on North America.”
Greenpeace and other environmental groups are convinced it is a deliberate attempt to stall action by insisting on more research. US citizens are worried about climate change and this is a way for Bush to defend his administration from accusations they are doing nothing, says Steven Guilbeault, a political adviser to Greenpeace International.
“Solutions are there, it’s just that Bush and his backers at Exxon don’t like them: More solar, wind, energy efficiency, and conservation,” Guilbeault said. (IPS)

SE Asia faces ‘catastrophic’ extinction rate
The rate of extinction threatening to engulf south-east Asia this century could be a “catastrophic” 20 percent, scientists say.
They base their warning on the example of Singapore, where key habitats have shrunk by 95 percent since 1819.
The scientists say it is the unprecedented rate of habitat loss that now threatens so many species.
South-east Asia is one of the Earth’s most important biodiversity “hotspots.”
The scientists, from Singapore, Japan, and Australia, report their findings in the journal Nature.
They found “substantial rates of documented and inferred extinctions, especially for forest species”, with butterflies, fish, birds, and mammals all affected.
“Forest reserves comprising only 0.25 percent of Singapore’s area now harbor over 50 percent of the residual native biodiversity,” the report says.
They think the rate at which habitats are disappearing is so great that south-east Asia will lose up to two-fifths of all its species over this century, at least half of them endemic species found nowhere else on Earth.
The overall loss of biodiversity, they calculated, was at least 28% - 881 of 3,196 recorded species.
Butterflies, freshwater fish, birds and mammals lost 34-43% of all species. About a quarter of all vascular plants, freshwater decapods and phasmids have disappeared.
The authors say rapid and large-scale habitat destruction was undoubtedly the predominant cause of Singapore’s extinctions.
With the few remaining protected nature reserves occupying only 0.25 percent of the island’s total land area, they worry at how much biodiversity is packed into so small a space.
On Singapore’s lessons for south-east Asia, they note a projected overall deforestation rate of 74 percent for the region by 2100.
They conclude: “We predict the overall loss of 13-42 percent of regional populations due to the effects of deforestation in south-east Asia by the end of the present century, at least half of which are likely to represent global species extinctions.” (BBC)