An environmental group borrowed the tactics of Victoria's Secret -- using models wearing little but angel wings -- to persuade the lingerie company Wednesday not to print catalogues on paper manufactured from endangered forests in Canada.
The agreement between Limited Brands, the parent company of Victoria's Secret, and an activist group called ForestEthics caps a high-profile campaign by environmentalists to move the catalogue industry toward using recycled paper.
Limited Brands, which sends out more than 350 million Victoria's Secret catalogues a year, promised to end purchases from an Alberta pulp mill logging in Canada's boreal forest. The agreement came after ForestEthics targeted the company's image with ads featuring bustier-clothed models toting chain saws.
"We're hoping to raise the bar on the availability of environmentally friendly paper and pulp, and we're hoping the logging, pulp and paper industry will rise to the occasion here," said Tom Katzenmeyer, a Limited Brand vice president, according to the Reuters news agency.
The agreement follows similar pledges made recently by Dell computer and Williams-Sonoma, the home furnishings retailer, to increase the recycled content of their catalogues and to steer paper purchases to companies logging in managed forests, where planting exceeds cutting.
ForestEthics said the catalogue industry uses less than 5 percent recycled paper. Companies such as Victoria's Secret, the group said, were helping destroy the boreal forest, an environmentally critical swath of green across the northern reaches of North America, Russia and Scandinavia.
"This is an industry that is ripe for change and doing incredible environmental damage," said Todd Paglia, executive director of ForestEthics. Victoria's Secret is getting its slick catalogue paper from West Fraser Timber Co., which cuts trees in the boreal forests of Alberta and British Columbia, according to the group.
"These are critical and endangered forests that West Fraser is destroying" through clear-cutting practices that also disrupt caribou habitat, he said.
But in Hinton, Alberta, the base for a major West Fraser pulp mill, Mayor Glenn Taylor called the group's claims "categorically false."
"They don't clear-cut up here. And it's simply not true we are taking away caribou habitat," said Taylor, who, like many in his town of 10,000, works for West Fraser. "This group is not telling the truth. Our boreal forest has actually grown," he said. "There is more boreal forest today than 50 years ago."
Taylor said that there is a high demand for the strong, bright paper pulp produced at Hinton and predicted that other customers would replace Victoria's Secret.
The paper company did not respond to inquiries, but the Forest Products Association of Canada defended the environmental record of the logging companies, saying ForestEthics was using "distorted information." Canada's companies lead the world in practicing sustainability techniques, and a U.N. report has declared Canada's deforestation rate at zero, the association said in a statement.
"I wish those things were actually true," Paglia responded. He said the company and the province of Alberta have engaged in "complete mismanagement" of the natural resources. And he said his group would soon begin targeting other catalogue companies, including Lands' End, L.L.Bean and J.Crew, to persuade them to move toward recycled paper.
"We are going to provide all these companies with the option of doing it the easy way," Paglia said. "If they want to do it the hard way, we can see a tremendous amount of negative press and damage to their brand."Washington Post
