This campaign follows on the heels of successful student-led market campaigns against Home Depot and other home improvement retailers and home builders. This student-led campaign will tell industry dinosaurs like Boise Cascade that business as usual just doesn't cut it. At more than 30 campuses from Vermont to South Carolina to Oregon, student organizers teamed up with university personnel to launch the campaign through activities including student rallies, free distribution of notebooks made from waste paper, meetings with university presidents, paper displays in college buildings, and press conferences.
Students refuse to buy wood and paper from endangered forests.
The Tree Free Campus Campaign calls for colleges and universities to use their buying power to purchase from companies that offer forest-friendly products. Over the past two years top wood users including Home Depot and Kinko's have committed to eliminating the use and sale of old growth wood and give preference to alternatives. Nearly twenty-five percent of the U.S. lumber market has pledged to transform its use of wood and paper products. More than three-quarters of the world's old growth forests have already been logged and degraded, much within the past three decades. In the United States, less than five percent of our original forests remain.