Home Depot Old Growth/Rainforest Campaign

Home Depot, the world's largest home improvement retailer, buys and sells wood from endangered rainforests around the world. This makes it a major link in the destruction of the world's old-growth and tropical forests. Other home improvement chains have switched to renewable wood sources or alternatives, and activists from Rainforest Action Network and other groups are asking Home Depot to do the same. While Home Depot has tried to portray itself as "green" by selling SOME wood from sustainable sources, we regard this as a "greenwash" as long as they still purchase wood ripped from the planet's last rainforests.

Here are some of the offending products:

• Lauan doors and plywood panels from Malaysia and Indonesia
• Cedar shingles from temperate rainforests in British Columbia
• Mahogany doors from Brazil (where much of the logging is done illegally) and Central America.
• Redwood planters & hot tubs from North America
• Douglas Fir lumber from North America
• Ramin dowels, tool handles from Borneo

What you can do:

• Do Not Buy These Products!
• Shop somewhere else and let HD know that you are doing so, by writing a letter to:

• Mr. Arthur Blank
• The Home Depot
• 2455 Paces Ferry Rd. NW
• Atlanta, GA 30339

Actions:

On Mar. 4, 1999, several activists from Drexel and the Suburban Greens demonstrated at the opening of a Home Depot in Conshohocken PA. Mar. 17 was the "National Day of Action" against Home Depot outlets nationwide. Reports have come in that over 80 stores were visited by demonstrators. In our area, Green activists and students from Eye Openers in Drexel University held a giant banner at the Cherry Hill Home Depot, followed by a "dead rainforest tour" of an outlet at Marlton NJ in which we commandeered the store intercom to broadcast the message: "don't buy old growth wood"! Public reaction was mostly amused or neutral, although an employee did try to harass us with a forklift truck. No arrests were made.

Several individual leafletting actions were done at other stores, with more planned for the future.

For further information about the Home Depot Campaign,

see Rainforest Action Network or homedepotsucks.com

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