Update! - We were featured on the Forest Ethics Community Blog!
See it @ http://www.forestethics.org/article.php?id=1455
Would you ever suspect a famous lingerie store to be one of the leading forests destroyers in the country? Probably not, but if you think about it, it makes sense. What's their leading form of advertising? Those annoying catologs that they mail to everyone, everywhere. I'm sure most of you have porbably and quite possibly still get them in the mail. They mail over ONE MILLION of these EVERY SINGLE DAY and around 395 MILLION A YEAR. They get all of the paper for these catalogs from paper suppliers who are a huge part of the 2 acres of forests bieng cut down EVERY MINUTE from endangered north american forests. You can read more facts here. Now you could argue that everyone else is doing it and wonder, "Why target Victoria's Secret?" Well, this is the hard part of changing things for the better within corporate america. It all has to start somewhere. Why then, was Victoria's Secret chosen? The main reasons probably include that they are one of the leading forests destroyers, plus a campaign of this style can gain a lot of media attention. Most of all, exposing Victoria's Secret would not only gain publicity, but expose all the paper suppliers and force them all to change the industry.
What we are asking and why- We want them to use recycled paper (at least 50% in five years), and to refuse to purchase paper from suppliers that took from endangered forests. This would force their paper suppliers to start selling more recycled products, and save the endangered forests from being used for unrecycled paper. Which would reach out far beyond just Victoria's Secret's forest consumption. We also want them to reduce their paper use entirely.
Another obstacle, or lame excuse for paper buyers, is that a crisp image doest come out as nicely on recycled paper, and it costs more. Does this excuse them for all the damage they've done? No way! They can still get a good image on post-consumer recycled paper, and they have the buying power to bring sustainable paper purchasing to the catalog industry, which is an essential reason to target them. Now instead of mailing our endangered forests to everyone, try sending it to the people who care! And only the people who care! Another thing; there's this thing called email. They should consider using it.
For all of this and more, I decided to volunteer for the April 11th day of action and bring a group of friends to a local store to hand out information and postcards to be mailed to the CEO of Victoria's Secret's parent company. This action was one of 225 events across the country! This was part of a campaign by
called
part of 
.
They have already gained great media coverage by Time Magazine, and Fortune/CNN Money. Forests Ethics has already gotten Staples and Office Depot to create great new environmental policies but one office giant still remains completely untame...Officemax. One by one they changed Staples and Office Depot, now it's Officemax's turn.
What was our day of action like? Well it went well for the circumstances. Other protests were great and got a lot of attention but they had more supplies, people, and planning. We, on the other hand, did not have enough supplies, but that was okay because the nearest store was at the Chestnut Hill Mall which is a very nice upper-class mall. If we had brought big banners and signed we wouldn't have been allowed to talk in the store. All we used were; postcards to the CEO, fact sheets (double sided to save trees!), and informational pamphlets.
First I had to send a few emails out to everyone and ended up with a group of 11 friends that came-
Jonathan Berman
Kevin Yan
Kristof Janezic
Jazzy PS
Eve Asher
Jenny Wu
Mike Thomas
Sam Wyler
Hanna Reder
Angie Head
And Me! (Danny P)
We carpooled to the mall (Thanks for the rides Kyle Janezic and Dad!), then we gathered up all of the supplies and decided how we were going to go about doing this. There were very few people in the mall at that time. We went at around 3:30 after school. So we just went over our Action Toolkit and reviewed all the information we had to know in case anyone asked and then we got to it. We split up and tried to get as many people interested as we could.
Many people were extremely stuck up and resistant but after getting around 25 postcards signed the mall manager and a bunch of security guards confrtonted us and asked us what we were doing. We told them and the manager told us that we couldn't be doing that and he had to ask us to leave.
He requested some information, so we gave him a fact sheet, a postcard, and a pamphlet. Then I asked him to deliver two petitions, one which anyone could sign and the other for members of NNHS, to the manager of the Victoria's Sectret store but he said he wouldn't and he only asked for the other stuff to read for himself. You can sign an individual letter too! They escorted us out of the mall, and sent two guards in a secuity vehicle to make sure that we were going completely off of mall property.
So we went across the street to the public parking lot and distributed the last of our supplies on peoples windshields, half of which were over-consuming SUV's (super useless vehicles) and my personal favorite killer, the Hummer.
After we were done, we got rides down to the pizza shop and got our own rides home from there. It was a lot of fun and we were doing something good! Maybe I'll do it again sometime and hand out information at the school instead. You can come too!
You can speak out here.
What we are asking and why- We want them to use recycled paper (at least 50% in five years), and to refuse to purchase paper from suppliers that took from endangered forests. This would force their paper suppliers to start selling more recycled products, and save the endangered forests from being used for unrecycled paper. Which would reach out far beyond just Victoria's Secret's forest consumption. We also want them to reduce their paper use entirely.
Another obstacle, or lame excuse for paper buyers, is that a crisp image doest come out as nicely on recycled paper, and it costs more. Does this excuse them for all the damage they've done? No way! They can still get a good image on post-consumer recycled paper, and they have the buying power to bring sustainable paper purchasing to the catalog industry, which is an essential reason to target them. Now instead of mailing our endangered forests to everyone, try sending it to the people who care! And only the people who care! Another thing; there's this thing called email. They should consider using it.
For all of this and more, I decided to volunteer for the April 11th day of action and bring a group of friends to a local store to hand out information and postcards to be mailed to the CEO of Victoria's Secret's parent company. This action was one of 225 events across the country! This was part of a campaign by
called part of .They have already gained great media coverage by Time Magazine, and Fortune/CNN Money. Forests Ethics has already gotten Staples and Office Depot to create great new environmental policies but one office giant still remains completely untame...Officemax. One by one they changed Staples and Office Depot, now it's Officemax's turn.
What was our day of action like? Well it went well for the circumstances. Other protests were great and got a lot of attention but they had more supplies, people, and planning. We, on the other hand, did not have enough supplies, but that was okay because the nearest store was at the Chestnut Hill Mall which is a very nice upper-class mall. If we had brought big banners and signed we wouldn't have been allowed to talk in the store. All we used were; postcards to the CEO, fact sheets (double sided to save trees!), and informational pamphlets.
First I had to send a few emails out to everyone and ended up with a group of 11 friends that came-
Jonathan Berman
Kevin Yan
Kristof Janezic
Jazzy PS
Eve Asher
Jenny Wu
Mike Thomas
Sam Wyler
Hanna Reder
Angie Head
And Me! (Danny P)
We carpooled to the mall (Thanks for the rides Kyle Janezic and Dad!), then we gathered up all of the supplies and decided how we were going to go about doing this. There were very few people in the mall at that time. We went at around 3:30 after school. So we just went over our Action Toolkit and reviewed all the information we had to know in case anyone asked and then we got to it. We split up and tried to get as many people interested as we could.Many people were extremely stuck up and resistant but after getting around 25 postcards signed the mall manager and a bunch of security guards confrtonted us and asked us what we were doing. We told them and the manager told us that we couldn't be doing that and he had to ask us to leave.
He requested some information, so we gave him a fact sheet, a postcard, and a pamphlet. Then I asked him to deliver two petitions, one which anyone could sign and the other for members of NNHS, to the manager of the Victoria's Sectret store but he said he wouldn't and he only asked for the other stuff to read for himself. You can sign an individual letter too! They escorted us out of the mall, and sent two guards in a secuity vehicle to make sure that we were going completely off of mall property.
So we went across the street to the public parking lot and distributed the last of our supplies on peoples windshields, half of which were over-consuming SUV's (super useless vehicles) and my personal favorite killer, the Hummer.After we were done, we got rides down to the pizza shop and got our own rides home from there. It was a lot of fun and we were doing something good! Maybe I'll do it again sometime and hand out information at the school instead. You can come too!
You can speak out here.
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