Portland, Ore. – David Ford was on his way to becoming a top timber industry lobbyist when he decided he’d had enough of the fighting in the 1990s over forests and the northern spotted owl.
He now heads a nonprofit called metaFore, which evolved from promoting sales of wood products from forests certified as environmentally sustainable to help Fortune 500 companies “green up” their paper supplies.
“Some of my colleagues in the forest products associations said, ‘You’ve gone to the dark side, David,”‘ Ford said. “I learned that the conflict wasn’t getting us where we wanted to be.”
Improving their public image and their bottom line, major corporations are moving from using less paper to demanding that the paper they use comes from environmentally sustainable sources, and letting stockholders and customers know they are doing it.
This month the metaFore Forest Leadership Forum drew 400 representatives of such corporations as Bank of America, Starbucks, Nike, Staples and Time Inc. to talk paper with environmental organizations including the World Wildlife Fund, Forest Ethics and the Dogwood Alliance.
“Climate change is becoming THE issue,” said David J. Refkin, director of sustainability for Time, the world’s largest magazine publisher and largest direct buyer of coated paper in the United States. “Increasingly, businesses will look to do business with businesses that are leaders in sustainability.”
Aaron Sanger, corporate program director of Forest Ethics, which keeps a “naughty and nice” list on catalog merchandisers, sees the marketplace producing faster results than the old venues of courts, Congress and campaigns.
“I never thought our group would end up working with big companies to help them sell paper products,” said Sanger. “We are realizing that if good products don’t make money, then we don’t win.”
Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School, said the question arises whether corporations embracing sustainability is “really true or is it greenwash.”
“I tend to think a lot of it is real,” he said from Vermont. “You have to look hard at performance, at actions, and penetrate the nice-sounding expressions of sustainability. That’s a very opaque term. You have to get to the bottom of what people are doing.”
To that end, Time Inc. publishes an annual sustainability report that lists its paper suppliers and printers. It also plans to switch from using its own questionnaires to rank paper suppliers to using the Environmental Paper Assessment Tool, a computer database that metaFore is rolling out this year.
