This past Thursday an historic environmental effort took place at the international level when Office Depot, the largest home office supply store in the world, committed to using 30 percent post-consumer recycled paper in the paper products it produces. Office Depot had decided to phase out past paper practices of cutting down endangered and vulnerable trees when it was pressured from student environmentalists across the country for the past year-and-a-half to stop logging down forests that are valuable to this great nation.
Student groups involved in this push for greater use of recycled paper products at Office Depot included the following: Rainforest Action Network, Student Sierra Coalition, Free the Planet, The Forest Stewardship Council, EcoPledge, Green Party, Public Interest Resource Group, EcoSense and numerous other ecologically based student-action organizations.
The official Office Depot Web site states that this policy was implemented in response to the concerns the company has for the environment, based on the following premises: "... to provide guidance for ongoing environmental stewardship, to promote the responsible use of our natural resources ... for all of the paper products we distribute" (http://www.community.officedepot.com/paperproc.asp).
Office Depot wants to be the industry leader in environmental progress in order to establish industry standards that foster sound recycling principles across its global home office supply store market. Office Depot has four goals in mind to lead the industry when working with its suppliers, which include: recycling products, product scope, recycling content and pollution reduction. The main objective of Office Depot is to focus on increasing recycling products in its paper home office products because the company would like to give priority to products made with "fiber and material recycled from recovered paper."
The new goals of the Office Depot's Environmental Paper Procurement Policy are to increase environmental awareness in paper product sales as follows: use increased recycled paper in all the paper products the company produces, reduce paper from biodiversity forests, unsustainable forests and illegally logged forests, topple the practice of genetically modified trees in paper production, eliminate the monoculture of plantation (where one type of tree is produced to be cut down to make additional paper) and to plant natural trees where genetically modified trees once stood.
Student environmentalists engaged in over a hundred events to convince Office Depot to change its environmental policies to be more forest friendly. Students did this by holding protests, staging theater, post carding and calling the headquarters of Office Depot.
Students from American University, Georgetown University and the George Washington University chapters of Free the Planet! (currently EcoSense) participated in street theater last year at the Office Depot store in Georgetown to promote this environmentally sound policy. In addition, students from the three local schools sent out numerous letters and met with the manager of Office Depot to discuss the need for progressive paper use at the international level. Students from a variety of environmental groups across the nation had participated in such activities to convince the CEO of Office Depot to transform the company's paper policies to make last Thursday's historic legislation possible.
Stephanie Furman is president of EcoSense at American University and is a junior in the School of Public Affairs and the College of Arts and Sciences. Contact her at americanuniversityecosense@yahoo.com.
