Lingerie
vendor stops using its pulp for its catalogues
Financial Post, December 07, 2006
An environmental decision by lingerie vendor Victoria's Secret to stop printing
its catalogues on paper supplied by West Fraser Timber Co. may tarnish the
industry's image, but will have little impact on the company's financials,
analysts said yesterday.
"It's negative press for West Fraser, and it's going to have some tangible
impact on tonnes shipped," said Pierre Lacroix, a forestry analyst with
Desjardins Securities in Montreal. "But I don't think financially speaking,
in the short term, it's going to be perceptible."
The long-term impact could, however, be greater if environmental groups can
leverage the high-profile announcement by Limited Brands, which owns Victoria's
Secret, into pressuring more retailers to abandon suppliers not certified to the
stringent standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
Yesterday, Limited announced it will give strong preference to FSC-approved
operations, begin using 10% recycled paper in its catalogues and cease using
pulp supplied by West Fraser, whose mill in Hinton, Alta., has drawn the ire of
lobby group Forest Ethics.
Over the last two years, that group has held more than 750 demonstrations as
part of its "Victoria's Dirty Secret" campaign aimed at drawing
attention to the paper in the company's catalogue.
Forest Ethics has accused the company of destroying endangered forests and
caribou habitat, a charge the company has countered in written statements saying
it has tempered harvesting activities in caribou ranges. All of West Fraser's
assets -- including its Hinton plant -- are certified to sustainable forest
management standards, although the company admits caribou numbers are dropping
in lands it harvests near Slave Lake, Alta.
Tzeporah Berman, Forest Ethics' program director, has pushed for forestry
companies to abandon half of forests used by woodland caribou, a species listed
in Canada as "threatened" which occupies 26% of Alberta land and 16%
of land in British Columbia.
"In Canada we've already lost 50% of caribou habitat," she said.
"The caribou are our canary in the coal mine, and what we know as we watch
them decline is that our forests are in trouble. We have in fact reached the
tipping point where we threaten the very ecosystem services that sustain human
well-being -- the air we breath and the water we drink --because of the massive
industrial incursions into what's left of the earth's forests."
The announcement drew anger from the Forest Products Association of Canada,
which defended its members as world leaders in environmental certification.
"The bottom line is if you're going to produce a catalogue, you're not
going to find stuff that's produced more responsibly than in Canada," said
association president and CEO Avrim Lazar. Victoria's Secret prints 360
million catalogues each year, placing it among the top six on the continent. Its
loss alone would "have very limited impact" on the industry, Lazar
said.
However, major American retailers Williams-Sonoma and Dell have made similar
announcements in recent weeks, and Mr. Lazar said a move among the environmental
lobby toward "don't go to anything from the boreal' is not a good
thing."
Although criticism had been muted in recent years, it's not the first time
forestry has come under attack from environmental groups. A little more than a
decade ago they focussed their energy on MacMillan Bloedel and managed to spawn
regulatory changes that raised compliance costs by 30% to 40%, said Ilan
Vertinsky, director of the forest economics and policy analysis research unit at
the University of British Columbia.
The Victoria's Secret announcement "creates a precedent that can be quite
dangerous to the industry," he said. "It doesn't take a large group or
a very powerful group to create enough disturbance to a buyer that the buyer is
going to have the incentive to switch."
More articles on this topic at---http://forestethics.org/