Top Catalogs Branded as Endangered Forest Destroyers

New York - At the annual American Forest Products Association conference in New York today, Lands' End/Sears, LL Bean, Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn, Limited/Victoria's Secret, J Crew, and JC Penney were named as leading targets for the next phase of ForestEthics' Paper Campaign, which has transformed the environmental practices of the office supply sector and is now focusing on the catalog industry. The companies collectively produce over 600 million catalogs a year in the United States, which are produced on paper that comes directly from Endangered Forests including the Canadian Boreal Forest, the largest remaining wilderness in North America.

"Printing on Endangered Forest paper is as out of fashion as the '83 Sears Christmas catalog," said Evan Thomas Paul, Paper Campaigner for ForestEthics. "To use the world's Endangered Forests for throw-away marketing is despicable."

Catalogs have surpassed magazines in overall paper use in the United States, using around 3.6 million tons of paper annually¹. According to Graphic Arts Products Tracking Research and Consulting, catalogs account for fifteen percent of U.S. printing demand by volume. (Telephone directories accounted for less than five percent and magazines around thirteen percent.)

ForestEthics and its allies are turning their focus towards the catalog industry and challenging it to stop buying paper from endangered forests and to maximize post-consumer recycled content in catalogs. Lands' End/Sears, LL Bean, William-Sonoma/Pottery Barn, Limited/Victoria's Secret, J Crew, and JC Penney were named as the top targets of this next phase of ForestEthics' campaign because they have some of the largest circulations in the industry, have links to endangered forests, and have refused to change their purchasing practices. The companies will be given 30 days to announce a purchasing policy and plan of action. Based on their responses, one of the five companies will be named as the campaign's next target later this spring.

"The Boreal accounts for one quarter of the Earth's remaining intact forests and is a critical regulator of global climate. The fact that this forest is being destroyed to make catalogs, 97% of which get thrown directly into garbage or recycling without any response, is unacceptable, particularly since they can largely be made from recycled fiber," said Lafcadio Cortesi, Boreal Program Director for ForestEthics.

Catalog Facts:

• Each year catalog retailers mail out about 17 billion catalogs. That's 59 for every man, woman and child in the United States. Yet almost none of this paper contains recycled content. This means that every year almost eight million tons trees go straight into catalogs that are often discarded or unread.
• There are 35 mills - 20 pulp and 15 paper - in the Boreal that supply pulp and paper for US catalogs
• The pulp from the Boreal pulp mills makes it into the vast majority of catalogs that reach Americans' mailboxes
• Direct links can be made from many Endangered Forests to catalogs. For example, the Little Smoky Endangered Forests in Alberta is being logged to supply Weldwood/International Paper's Hinton pulp mill which supplies pulp to catalogs produced in the United States.

The Boreal:

Over three quarters of the intact, original forests that once covered the earth are degraded or gone². A quarter of what remains is in the Canadian Boreal. Stretching across North America from Alaska to the Atlantic, the Boreal is thirteen times the size of California - 1.3 billion acres. Because of its vastness and of the fact that nearly 70% of it is intact, the Canadian Boreal forest is one of the world's greatest conservation opportunities.

¹Mies, Will. "Catalog Publishers Rebound from Low Consumer Confidence to Fuel Future Paper Demand Growth." Paperloop.com. www.Paperloop.com. Accessed 10 September 2003.

²Bryant, Dirk, et al. The Last Frontier Forests: Ecosystems and Economies on the Edge. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC. 1997.