Don’t cut old-growth for office paper
Office Depot, stop selling paper made with trees from old-growth forests
2003 August 5
The initiative and facts came from ecopledge.com and the message was sent through their system. At the time the Office Depot campaign was available through this link.
My letter is a rewriting of their form letter. I threw in the stuff about boycotting.
Dear Ms. Maita,
I ask that Office Depot stop selling paper products made with trees from endangered and old growth forests.
As a supporter of ecopledge.com who carried out a boycott against Staples last year until they agreed to greatly increase the recycled content of their paper and stops the sale of products made from trees that are taken from endangered forests. I will not shop at Office Depot until equal or better environmental policies are adopted.
Almost 80% of the world's original old growth forests are gone. Another 300,000 acres of old-growth forests would be destroyed by the year 2020 at current logging rates.
Paper consumes more wood than any other industry. Office Depot needs to do its part to lessen the loss. I urge you to stop selling products made from endangered and old growth forests. See you then,
Benjamin Melançon [etc.]
Office Depot’s reply came the next day:
Mr. Benjamin Melancon
33 Fisher Street
Natick, MA 01760
Dear Mr. Melancon:
Thank you for your e-mail from earlier today. In response, we want to assure you that Office Depot is indeed committed to environmental stewardship and the conservation of our natural resources. This commitment extends broadly to the products we offer, the services we provide, and the way in which we operate our business. And we believe our actions, outlined below, are the best evidence of this commitment.
Product Offerings:
· Since 2001, Office Depot has offered its Greentop 35% post-consumer waste content paper through its retail stores and to its largest customers (This exceeds the federal and state guidelines of 30%). We are the only major national retailer to offer a recycled content paper that exceeds government guidelines as a basic offering to large corporate and small retail customers. Importantly, we offer our Greentop paper at a price level very competitive with non-recycled content papers.
· Environmental stewardship, of course, encompasses far more than paper products, and Office Depot currently sells well over 2,000 different items containing recycled content. These items range from copy paper, to legal pads, to file folders, to pencils, to plastics, to cardboard, and even to paperclips.
· We are also embarking on new programs including the sale in our stores of 100% post-consumer waste recycled content papers. These include copy papers and legal pads under the Envirotech brand name.
Service Offerings:
· For our business customers, we recently introduced a business relationship with GreenOrder, an environmental audit firm that will offer to our customers guidance in selecting the most environmentally responsible products. We are extremely excited at this opportunity to better inform our customers of the value of buying environmentally friendly products from Office Depot.
· Office Depot currently has a store-based program for recycling inkjet and toner cartridges, which we encourage all our customers to take advantage of, and which we believe is unique to our industry.
Our Business Operations:
· We also believe that when it comes to conservation, we must lead by example. In 2001 we launched an Intranet-based retail store portal for our more than 30,000 retail employees, eliminating distribution of paper-intensive documents.
· We have moved to a "paperless fax program" that routes text files to our employees' desktop as opposed to printing out customer's fax order requests for processing.
· Finally, we have implemented an Intranet-based bill paying and receipt management program. We will continue to focus on such initiatives now and in the future.
Moving forward, we understand more can and should be done. We are now developing a comprehensive environmental policy that will guide every aspect of our business. The policy will be developed in consultation with critical stakeholders, including leading environmental organizations. This will allow us to learn more about environmental concerns, share ideas and approaches, and develop workable solutions to the issues we collectively face. We will report on our progress, and invite review of our performance through the use of auditing and third party verification.
Please come by one of our stores and bring an ink or toner cartridge for recycling to take advantage of our promotion offering of a ream of Greentop paper in exchange for your empty cartridge. We believe you will see our commitment to environmental stewardship as well as the advantages of using our Greentop paper over one of our Competitor's products.
Sincerely,
Beth M. Maita
Customer Relations Assistant
They are clearly sensitive to the complaint, but “Greentop” – 35% post-consumer recycled paper at a “competitive” price as their best environmental offering – is close to greenwashing; their 100% post-consumer recycled remains in the future. And I could have sworn the letter I sent focused on banning paper products made from old-growth forests. (This demonstrates to me the importance of having a communications division. Even though the reply came back the next day and my message was reprinted under Beth Maita’s, if it weren’t for updating this page I might not have noticed that she didn’t address the subject line of our e-mail exchange: “RE: stop selling products made from old growth forests”
So I wrote back to Customer-Relations, and “carbon-copied” one to ecopledge.
Dear Beth Maita,
Thank you for detailing Office Depot's impressive environmental programs and commitments, some of which I knew about. I should have been courteous enough to mention as much in my letter. I am heartened by the effort Office Depot is taking to be responsible for its impact on the environment.
My specific concern, though, was the rapidly-vanishing old-growth forests, which is presently a far more urgent problem than recycled content. I do urge Office Depot to go ahead with its 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper, a welcome initiative. It will be, in fact, the only way I can buy paper at Office Depot and be sure none of it was produced in part by tearing down the rich life-sustaining ecosystems of old-growth forests, because the government doesn't require that content to be listed.
What I am seeking immediately from Office Depot is a pledge not to buy paper products made with trees from endangered or old-growth forests. This could have a huge impact in saving these forests. You could announce the ban to customers, and quite probably paper from regrowth or farm trees is not significantly more expensive than that with old-growth forest content. Moreover, name whoever you are concerned will undersell you, and I promise to put the same pressure on them, as was done with Staples and now Office Depot, and of course I will push ecopledge to do the same. Staples, which has agreed to stop selling paper from endangered and old-growth forests, is your only major competitor in my area.
In any case, saving the world's remaining old-growth forests are important enough to take some slight risk to save them. Staples did, and regardless of other preferences I'm shopping there until Office Depot does too.
Thank you,
Benjamin Melançon