On Thursday, nine protesters traveled icy roads from Oberlin to the OfficeMax near Elyria’s Midway Mall. Store employees and shoppers were greeted with shouts of “OfficeMax, put down your axe!” from protesters.
Organized by OhioPIRG and an environmental group known as the Paper Campaign, students hope to convince OfficeMax to sell paper with an average of 30 percent post-consumer recycled content.
A similar campaign targeting Staples, the world’s largest office supply chain, succeeded last November when the company met protesters’ demands, even installing a Vice President of Environmental Affairs.
Now, Office Depot and OfficeMax, respectively the second and third largest office supply chains, are facing similar pressure.
Thursday’s protests extended beyond the Elyria OfficeMax. Sophomore Alycia Usher, Secretary of Oberlin PIRG, helped organize a “call-in,” encouraging passersby in Wilder to call OfficeMax’s customer service line and speak in favor of the cause.
Usher considered the day’s activism a success.
“There were a lot of people who stopped and read our signs and received our flyers,” she said. “The organizer at Oberlin for today’s event went in and handed the manager of the store a letter [explaining our cause]. The manager was apparently very receptive.
“Other than that, people paid a lot of attention to what we were doing — screaming in the parking lot and holding signs,” she added.
Organizers for the cause claim that OfficeMax could make a significant difference by selling more recycled paper.
“Five million acres are lost each year due to clear-cutting, and 50 percent of those trees are used to make paper,” Paper Campaign employee Orli Cotel said.
“We believe OfficeMax is contributing directly to this rate of deforestation,” Usher said. “They are a huge supplier [of paper].”
Sophomore Andrew Zilm said that he is not satisfied with current methods used by the companies from which OfficeMax purchases paper.
“Although these manufacturers claim to replant a tree for every tree cut down, instead they replant the area with only a single species of tree in orderly rows,” he said. “This makes an ideal tree farm, but has none of the ecological diversity of natural old-growth forests and is not a substitute habitat for species that occupy our old-growth forests.”
Recycled paper is often more expensive than non-recycled paper, largely due to lesser demand. OfficeMax stores currently sell mainly non-recycled paper, with “maybe one brand of 30 percent post-consumer paper on a back shelf, and no 100 percent recycled paper,” according to Cotel.
In contrast, about half of the office paper sold in the Elyria Staples Supercenter has at least some post-consumer content.
Asked how well recycled paper sold in his store, a Staples sales manager answered, “customers usually choose based on price, but the 10 percent and 30 percent recycled store brand is the cheapest we have, so people usually go for that.”
Cotel said that OfficeMax officials have been “unwilling to meet demands.”
OfficeMax has discouraged store owners from speaking with protesters, instead asking them to defer to corporate headquarters. Elyria OfficeMax employees declined to comment on the protests.
Oberlin students were more forthcoming.
“It would be very easy for OfficeMax to implement a program similar to Staples,” first-year Brandi Eng-Rohrbach said.
“Staples has already gotten on the bandwagon,” Usher added. “OfficeMax needs to be more responsible.”
Looking forward, organizers have planned a national day of action for March 26. More information can be found at their website, http://www.thepapercampaign.com.