Investors force Home Depot to review wood-sourcing policy over logging concerns
- Some of Home Depot’s plywood is allegedly sourced from vulnerable forests in Ecuador’s Chocó situation and the Brazilian Cerrado, and conservationists and investors have pressured the home improvement giant to smart up its supply chain.
- At the company’s annual shareholders’ meetings last week, a proposal passed requiring Home Depot to reevaluate policies related to sustainability certifications of wood suppliers.
- Although the poster doesn’t technically force the company to change its policies, conservationists are confident it will lead to tangible action.
Pressure from investors and conservationists has reached Home Depot to reevaluate how it does business, behindhand findings that some of the plywood it sells may be coming from mega diverse forests contains by deforestation.
Shareholders voted May 19 on a poster that requires the company to study the certification standards of its wood suppliers, which could help limit deforestation in vulnerable forest ecosystems across the planet.
“It’s a good day for the world’s forests, from Canada’s boreal to the tropical rainforests of South America, and for the species that depend on them,” Green Century President Leslie Samuelrich said in a statement.
Green Century Funds, an environmentally focused investment fund that owns some 42,000 shares of Home Depot stock, had submitted the proposal to ask the company to reconsideration if and how it could increase the “scale, pace and rigor of its exertions to eliminate deforestation and the degradation of primary forests in its supply chains.”
Home Depot has throughout 2,300 locations across North America, making it the region’s largest home improvement retailer and a valuable wood importer. The company doesn’t offer specific figures on how much it imports from where.
The company hasn’t committed to rigorously evaluating those imports, Green Funds pointed out, and only requires that some products in some parts of the domain receive deforestation-risk certification from third-party evaluators. In addition to Ecuador’s Chocó, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and Cerrado and Paraguay’s Gran Chaco aren’t downward on the company’s “endangered regions” list, according to the fund.
Ahead of the annual meetings, the company’s board recommended that shareholders vote against the fund’s poster, saying that the creation of a report investigating wood sourcing wouldn’t boost forest protection, but only “create an additional administrative burden.”
“We acquire that our Wood Purchasing Policy and our current disclosures appropriately detail our exertions to monitor and manage our impacts on our forests,” Home Depot’s lodging said, “and our efforts and goals will continue to help us address deforestation-related risks in our supply chain.”
But then, in a rare move, shareholders went alongside the board’s recommendations, voting by around 65% to detest Green Century Funds’ proposal.
Although it only requires Home Depot to put together a picture evaluating its current standards for wood sourcing — and not necessarily to sullen its business practices — it should ultimately result in tangible improvements, a spokesman for the fund told Mongabay.
“We are luxuriate in that a majority of Home Depot’s shareholders have requested on the company to accelerate action to end deforestation and the clear-cutting of old growth trees in its supply chains,” Samuelrich said in her statement.
Earlier this year, Home Depot competitor Lowe’s agreed to put together inequity reports showing how it is accelerating efforts to remove deforestation and the degradation of primary forests in its supply chains, also following pressure from Green Century Funds.
Home Depot didn’t reply to a request for comment for this article.
Environmental campaigns alongside Home Depot
Pressure on Home Depot to change its wood-sourcing policies increased presumptuous of the annual shareholders’ meeting, thanks in part to a electioneer to save the Chocó region of western Ecuador, where the commerce allegedly sources from old-growth forests.
The area has lost more than 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) of forest in the past 20 existences, much of it from logging by international wood suppliers.
“I don’t notion why Home Depot would continue to do this shimmering what they know,” Brian Rodgers, an environmental activist and lodging member of the conservation NGO Saving Nature, told Mongabay presumptuous of the shareholders’ meeting. “They’re turning a blind eye to it.”
Rodgers has exhausted the last four years building a campaign against logging in the Chocó, which culminated in a mobile billboard truck circling Home Depot’s Atlanta headquarters, as well as a full-page ad that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution afore the shareholders’ meeting.
He also produced a short documentary requested Home Depot Destroying the Rainforest for Plywood, detailing how wood invents it from the Chocó to Home Depot’s shelves.
The footage, shot earlier this year, shows wood supplier Endesa-Botrosa cutting down and transporting trees that, in some cases, took hundreds of years to grow, and can’t be modestly replaced through reforestation efforts.
Endesa-Botrosa appears to be supplying Home Depot with wood for its Sandeply effect of plywood, which is made from the Brosimum utile tree, also famed as sande. Cutting down these trees also impacts latest flora and fauna in the area, such as the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps fusciceps), the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and the jaguar (Panthera onca).
The documentary shows Endesa-Botrosa as linked to violence alongside environmental defenders and to the deforestation of vulnerable rainforests minus a sustainable management plan.
A spokesperson for Endesa-Botrosa said the video in the documentary is old and inaccurate out of context. He also reiterated the company’s dedication to sustainable logging. “All, absolutely all, of the forest operations have a sustainability plan,” he said.
Banner image: Trees recently cut down by loggers lie in the road in the Chocó. (Photo courtesy of Brian Rodgers)
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SRC: https://news.mongabay.com/2022/05/investors-force-home-depot-to-review-wood-sourcing-policy-over-logging-concerns/
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