Buying Green > Buying Papers from Certified "Responsibly Managed Forests"
The never-ending question in forest certification has been "is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) the only credible forest certification program?" Office Depot has had a long-standing position of accepting all of the main certification standards. Based on data from non-certified forests vs. forests certified to any standard, we know that some certification is almost always better than none.
We have led our industry by encouraging suppliers of marketing (catalog, direct mail and insert) papers and cut-sheet papers to source fiber from certified forests. Our historic position has been that since under 10% of the world's forests are certified to any certification program, we need to grow demand for "certified" fiber overall rather than FSC only.
In 2008, based on input from our partners in the Forest & Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, and discussions with Greenpeace and ForestEthics, we decided to give policy preference to FSC-certified papers - when all other things (price, quality, service) are equal.