ForestEthics Aims For Environmentally Friendly Direct Marketing

Nonprofit forest advocacy group ForestEthics, has been running a campaign for the last 18 months trying to get Victoria's Secret, which sends out 395 million catalogs annually, to use more recycled paper and less virgin timber in their catelogs. Apparently some strides have been made by VC, but not enough to stop ForestEthics from continuing their campaign. The microsite Victoria's Dirty Secret implies that VC needs to end its relationship with "irresponsible International Paper".

ForestEthics estimates that the catalog industry sends out 17 billion catalogs, or 59 catalogs per person living in the United States, per year. Most of those catalogs contain little to no recycled content. ForestEthics wants Victoria's Secret to stop purchasing paper made from endangered forests and increase its use of recycled fiber to 50 percent over the next five years.

A quarter of Victoria's Secret catalog paper is harvested from the Canadian boreal forest, which covers 1.4 billion acres -- an area that would fit 13 states the size of California. The forest is all but ignored, except by a small population of native people, and the logging companies have a free run at most of it. Sixty percent of the trees logged in the boreal go to produce paper pulp for office paper and catalogs for U.S. consumption.

The fact that the group has been going after Victoria's Secret is the number of catelogs they send out.

Log in Lingerie, St. Louis, Day of Action Valentines Day 2006:

There is still a long way to go. Even with ForestEthics' campaigns, less than five percent of printing (catalogs and magazines) and writing (office printer paper) has recycled fiber in it, according to Gleason.

Gleason said there isn't enough pressure on paper companies right now to produce recycled-content paper, so it doesn't happen. Paper companies have been so good at finding cheap virgin sources of wood in recent years that the percentage of recycling content of paper has actually dropped in half.

But ForestEthics is pushing in the right direction. Its paper campaign, which went after office supply stories beginning in 2000, has influenced a recent uptick in paper pulp production. RISI, which tracks the North American pulp market, reported that pulp mills are operating at a record 90 percent capacity. RISI economist David Clapp said the rise was directly attributable to increased demand from big national office stores such as Staples and Office Depot, which are now requiring paper made with up to 30 percent recycled content from postconsumer recovered paper.

After ForestEthics pushed Staples to shift its paper-buying policy, the recycled content in a ream of copy paper went from 3 percent to 20 percent.

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Paglia hopes the companies targeted by ForestEthics will one day become allies in leveraging better environmental stewardship from governments and forest products companies. He points to Office Depot and Staples, trying to one-up each other on the amount of recycled content in their paper, and envisions a day when companies compete for customers by being more "green."