FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — After embarrassing Staples Inc. into agreeing to sell more recycled products, a coalition of environmental groups is threatening to launch a similar campaign against Office Depot.
ForestEthics and the Dogwood Alliance declared victory this week in their two-year campaign to persuade Staples to increase the recycled content of its paper products to 30 percent. Now the two groups are preparing a letter to Office Depot urging the Delray Beach, Fla., company to make the same commitment or face a campaign of picketing, shareholder actions and denunciations by celebrities.
“Staples now set a very high standard,” said Todd Paglia, director of the Paper Campaign for ForestEthics, a San Francisco environmental group. “We’re hoping that Office Depot responds with a strong environmental policy, and there isn’t a year or two of campaigning on this issue to get them to see the light.”
Eileen Dunn, Office Depot’s vice president for investor and public relations, said the company already has high environmental standards. She said Office Depot offers more than 1,700 products made at least partially from recycled materials, including a desk-organizer with a recycled content of 85 percent. And she said the company, which operates more than 1,000 stores, requires suppliers to certify that none of their products comes from rainforests or old-growth forests.
Dunn said the company’s recycling percentage was already “in the double digits,” but she was unable to say what the percentage was.
“Office Depot has been focused on the environment,” she said.
But Paglia said Staples had also required suppliers to certify that no paper came from old-growth forests, and the claim turned out not to be true. ForestEthics released a report last August, “The Credibility Gap at Staples,” which claimed that Staples’ suppliers cut down trees in environmentally sensitive forests of Indonesia and northern Canada.
© 2002 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.