Salt shakers
September 1999

Home Depot to rid its showrooms of "old growth" lumber
After enduring the brunt of a two-year grassroots campaign urging Home Depot to stop selling old growth wood products, the retail leader announced today in Atlanta that the company would end sales of wood from endangered areas by the end of 2002. Home Depot is currently the world's largest retailer of old growth wood products.

"With today's announcement, Home Depot has taken a leadership role in the U.S. do-it-yourself industry," a Rainforest Action Network spokesperson said. "By phasing out of old growth wood products—or 'wood from endangered areas,' as Home Depot prefers to say—the company has joined the growing ranks of leading companies around the world who agree that selling old growth wood is unacceptable and must be stopped."

For the past two years, forest protection leader RAN has led an international campaign urging Home Depot to stop selling old growth wood. RAN has staged high-profile demonstrations at company headquarters, including hanging a giant banner there last October with the words: "Home Depot, Stop Selling Old Growth Wood." RAN has also worked with major institutional shareholders, fought Home Depot expansion plans at local city council meetings, coordinated a hard-hitting national ad campaign, and organized demonstrations at several hundred Home Depot across the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Chile.

Old growth forests are forests that have never been logged commercially, and are the most endangered forest areas on the planet. The giant trees in some old growth forests are over 2,000 years old. The Amazon rainforest is tens of thousands of years old, large portions of which have never been touched by commercial logging. Around the world less than twenty percent of these original forests survive, and less than four percent in the United States.

The wide array of old growth products Home Depot currently carries includes lumber from the ancient temperate rainforests of British Columbia, old growth lauan and ramin from Southeast Asia, and bigleaf mahogany from the Amazon. Although the company has promised to sell a small line of products that carry environmental certification, that volume is surpassed many times over by the wood it sells from the planet's most endangered forest regions.

Home Depot President and CEO Arthur M. Blank said, "Our pledge to our customers, associates and stockholders is that Home Depot will stop selling wood products from environmentally sensitive areas," Blank said. "Home Depot embraces its responsibility as a global leader to help protect endangered forests. By the end of 2002, we will eliminate from our stores wood from endangered areas—including lauan, redwood and cedar products—and give preference to 'certified' wood."

To carry the "certified" label, a supplier's wood must be tracked from the forest, through manufacturing and distribution, to the customer and must ensure a balance of social, economic and environmental factors.

The company's commitment is a huge challenge for Home Depot as well as for its suppliers, noted Blank. "Our company sells less than 10 percent of the lumber in the world, but is still the largest single retailer of lumber in the world," Blank said. "Today, the world supply of certified wood is extremely limited. "Home Depot will use the power of its purchasing dollars to vote for products that do the most to preserve environmentally sensitive areas," he said.

"We are asking our vendors to help us by dramatically increasing the supply of ceritifed forest products." Blank said Home Depot is encouraging other home improvement retailers to follow its lead. "I hope our competitors join us in this effort to save environmentally sensitive areas around the world and to promote alternative wood prodcucts," he said.

Home Depot's new purchasing policy is the latest of Rainforest Action Network's recent campaign successes. In 1998, RAN ended its boycott of Mitsubishi Motors America and Mitsubishi Electric America when the two companies adopted revolutionary environmental policies. RAN also worked to get MacMillan Bloedel, the largest lumber company in Canada to stop clear-cutting in old growth forests. In December 1998, 27 U.S. corporations—including IBM, Dell, Kinko's, Nike, 3M, Levi-Strauss, Mitsubishi Motors America, Mitsubishi Electric America, and others—announced their commitment to stop selling or using old growth wood. Europe's largest home improvement center, B&Q, has nearly completed removing old growth wood from its shelves.—Kevin Clarke

 

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