30% Post-Consumer Recycled Paper...
30% Too Much For OfficeMax
by Megan Chapman

OfficeMax, an international chain of office supplies stores with headquarters in the Northwest suburb of Itasca, is trailing the competition—in this case, Staples and Office Depot—in its environmental commitment as well as in sales.

At the April 20 annual shareholder meeting at the Wyndham Hotel next door to corporate headquarters, OfficeMax faced a considerable challenge from a re-launched environmental campaign headed by activist groups Forest Ethics and the Dogwood Alliance. A group of activists demonstrated outside the meeting, distributing literature to shareholders and their representatives, while another group staked out spots inside the brief meeting, dominating the question and answer session, according to campaign organizers Perrin de Jong of Forest Ethics and Eva Hernandez of the Dogwood Alliance.

The group of four or five activists inside highlighted how much OfficeMax lags behind industry competitors by not making a commitment to recycled paper. “Environmental commitments are a growing trend in the business world,” says Hernandez, “and Office Max is lagging behind. “

The group directed questions to OfficeMax CEO Sam Duncan, board members and the environmental officer Sue Mills. Questions specifically addressed the company’s use of paper from endangered forests in the Canadian Boreal and the Cumberland Plateau in the American South. At the end of the meeting, which lasted no more than 25-30 minutes, Hernandez closed with a statement about the environmental future entrusted to the corporation.

“I left them with the thought that the fate of these endangered forests lies in their hands,” she says. “We also presented the CEO with two beautifully framed photographs of the Cumberland Plateau.”

Activists joined a group of about 40 or 50 other shareholders and representatives in a meeting closed to the press. Along with Hernandez were Andrew Goldberg, also of Dogwood Alliance, another campaign activist from Forest Ethics, and Lamar Marshall of grassroots environmental organization Wild South.

Goldberg is an OfficeMax shareholder and the Director of Implementation and Research at Dogwood Alliance, an environmental protection group based in Asheville, North Carolina. Goldberg works with Staples and Office Depot—the leading office supplies corporations worldwide, which announced progressive paper procurement policies in 2002 and 2004 respectively (http://www.staples.com/sbd/content/about/soul/environment.html and http://www.community.officedepot.com/epap.asp)--to ensure that they are meeting their commitments and these policies are taking effect.

Goldberg reports that these companies’ success is progressive. The first step is that they have made clear, strong policy commitments. The second step is that they have undertaken the obligation to report—transparency, he says, is key. Finally, there is substantial progress toward achieving the goals laid out in the policy commitments. Staples, for example, is reporting 28% post-consumer-recycled paper content overall, just 2% off of their goal.

Meanwhile, both companies are taking even broader, more challenging steps towards corporate environmental responsibility, says Goldberg. Office Depot has begun to cancel contracts with suppliers who break their policies and use illegal wood. Staples, meanwhile, has begun to weigh in on forest protection issues, such as road building through endangered areas.

Both Staples and Office Depot created their paper procurement policies largely in response to the Paper Campaign, launched jointly in 2000 by the Dogwood Alliance and Forest Ethics. OfficeMax, on the other hand, has made no move to adopt such a policy. The company was largely given a respite by Paper Campaign organizers during a series of corporate restructures following its acquisition by Boise Cascade in 2003.

Since the Paper Campaign organizers re-targeted OfficeMax in 2005, no concrete steps have been announced. As of this writing, OfficeMax’s environmental page directs the reader to “check back”—which may be a hopeful sign or merely pacification (http://about.officemax.com/html/officemax_environmental_policy.shtml).

The company’s environmental officer, Sue Mills, did not return phone calls requesting her comment on the recent shareholder meeting. In a brief article from chicagobusiness.com released on the afternoon of the shareholder meeting, the OfficeMax spokesman did much to downplay the happenings of the meeting. After stating that there was no formal question-and-answer period during the fifteen-minute meeting, the spokesman went on to say that, “the meeting agenda contained only ‘perfunctory’ topics, and nothing of interest to the news media,” the article reports.

“The company spokesman was evidently eager to portray a ‘nothing to see here - move along’ picture of the meeting,” says Chicago-based campaign organizer Perrin de Jong of Forest Ethics.

De Jong relocated to Chicago in February 2006 to mobilize local ground support for the OfficeMax campaign. At the shareholder meeting, he led a group of nine volunteer activists—not an easy feat for a Thursday morning protest in the suburbs—who held a banner and distributed fliers, hitting incoming shareholders with the campaign’s new “OfficeMaxe” logo. The logo’s message is clear—black, white and red, with the image of an axe unsympathetically felling the last three letters of the new store name. And underneath the words: Forest Destroyer.

“The attack on branding may be seen as a surrender to capitalism but it is key to this kind of corporate campaign,” de Jong says. “Corporations invest fortunes in their brand name and logo, and they will not sit by quietly and watch someone else redefine these symbols.”

Activism that aims for corporate responsibility may also be seen as surrender to capitalism. But de Jong, for one, frames it differently. He feels that, as compared to the successes of the 1950s-70s, progressive people are disempowered these days. By the end of those decades, it seemed that the approach had been honed—enforcing progressive policies for corporations through government and legal mechanisms “Now,” de Jong says, “under the current government, these traditional mechanisms are stymied—we can no longer be confident in our ability to seek redress through these government-supported mechanisms.

“Corporate responsibility campaigns,” he says, “are born out of the search for a ‘market angle,’ in order to cut out the middleman”—in this case, an unreliable government. “We need to go straight to the corporations who are laying waste to our world, and hold them accountable.”

This approach, of course, relies on an educated and active public, willing to buy (and invest) according to conscience. As Goldberg says, “the checkout line has become the equivalent of the ballot box.” The public chooses when it buys, and it chooses when it invests. Goldberg also points to environmentally responsible investment firms, such as Boston-based Green Century Funds, which was present at the OfficeMax shareholder meeting.

In Chicago, those interested in more information about how to get involved in the OfficeMax Campaign can contact perrin@forestethics.com for more information about upcoming local actions. Chicagoans interested in supporting local business while OfficeMax shapes up its environmental act should consider contacting Chicagoland-only Order-from-Horder (http://www.hordersofficesupplies.com/ofh/store/ofh_dynamicIndex.asp), which carries a good supply of recycled paper in several downtown shops.