Mark Buckley
The company teamed up with environmental NGO, the Dogwood Alliance, to help promote sustainable forestry.
Ecosystem Marketplace reports that Staples and the Dogwood Alliance have become “true partners”, a collaboration which came about after Dogwood Alliance’s founder, Danna Smith, helped to coordinate “over 600 protests” outside various Staples stores 17 years ago. Smith was particularly concerned about the logging going on in the Southeastern United States, a region which “squeezes out 12 percent of the world’s wood, pulp, and paper”.
The franchise responded by questioning the protests, as Staples does not log forests directly, and Smith had to concede that they were right.
However, long-term studies she had commissioned revealed that retailers were a crucial part of the “long and intricate supply chains” that run between the forests being logged and those who receive the paper produced by the pulping of their wood.
As a result, she met with Mark Buckley, who was Staples’ Director of Procurement, and the pair, along with other environmental organisations, have developed an “uncommon collaborative”, with Smith calling Mark “a real visionary”.
Earlier this year, they concluded a ten-year experiment dubbed Carbon Canopy, “which set out to see if small landowners could tap carbon markets to subsidise their transition to sustainable land management”, a project which has “spawned” other similar efforts “that build on its success and learn from its lessons.”
As a result of Buckley’s efforts to help protect the environment he was named Staples’ Vice President of Environmental Affairs in 2002 “when Staples found its own demand for certified wood products far exceeded the entire country’s supply.”
“We started approaching our suppliers, and we were able to get more sustainable fiber from the northern part of the country, but the Southeastern United States remained a bottleneck,” says Buckley.
“Ninety percent of the land is privately owned, and most of that belongs to very small owners, so it’s a very complex supply chain,” says Smith. “Plus, in order to become certified, there’s a cost involved, and there’s not always an adequate return in terms of the benefit that the landowner would get from harvesting.”
While this problem proved “intractable”, Buckley and Smith were aided by Staples suppliers such as Domtar and the likes of Columbia Forest Products, which is the main supplier of hardwood plywood in the US.
“We invited Danna to meet our suppliers, and she helped us connect with some of the landowners in her area,” says Buckley. “We started to find there were a lot of people out there who had been wrestling with this idea of creating a different value proposition for small forest owners – one that could make it worth their while to leave trees in the ground.”
Around this period, Staples “had joined the World Resources Institute’s Green Power Market Development Group and Buckley “began researching ecosystem markets” which aid in the creation of a “$25 billion restoration economy that employs more people than logging, coal mining, or steel production.”
In 2006, Buckley and Smith met up at the headquarters of the Dogwood Alliance.
“We went for a hike, and it was my first direct exposure to the southern forests,” he says. “Then Danna and I and Andrew [Goldberg, Dogwood’s director of corporate engagement] went for beers at a place called Jack of the Wood, and all of these elements started to create the germ of an idea around land-based carbon offsets.”
The trio “wondered if carbon finance was lucrative enough to make it worthwhile for small, shoestring operations” and decided to test the notion in the forests of Southern Appalachia, with the Forestland Group agreeing to pilot the scheme and the Pacific Forest Trust handling carbon accounting.
A decade later, and “30 percent of Staples’ paper products meet the company’s sustainability criteria” and the Forestland Group has “embarked on a plan to expand its carbon finance area from 9,700 acres to 240,000 acres in the Southern Appalachians.”
Dogwood has also united with “more than two dozen other organisations in the Wetland Forest Initiative, which aims to protect 35 million acres of wetland forests”. However the unfortunate truth is that governments and investors are still spending over “40-times more money into forest destruction than conservation” and this “tragic imbalance” will “ultimately destroy more economic value than it creates unless more executives follow Buckley’s lead”.