Environmental Groups Urge Staples to Sell More Recycled Paper

Danielle Jackson

San Francisco -- Students, concerned citizens and grassroots activists have spent the past three days attending more than 200 demonstrations calling on Staples Inc. to stop selling paper made from endangered forests and switch to recycled resources.

The demonstrations are part of a coalition effort by more than a dozen organizations that say that based on a figure quoted by Staples executives in Nov. 2000, 97 percent of the copy paper the company sell comes from forests -- only 3 percent comes from recycled sources.

This is not the first attempt to get Staples to be more environmentally friendly. A campaign launched one year ago caused the company to introduce two lines of recycled paper containing 10 percent and 50 percent post-consumer recycled fiber. But environmentalists were not pleased. They want Staples to make a long-term committment by creating an official company policy to stop buying products from old-growth and U.S. public forests, and to increase the average recycled content in its paper products to 50 percent.

Meantime, Staples has been announced as an official sponsor of America Recycles Day (ARD), Nov. 15.