June 22nd, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Office Depot is taking its green commitment to a new level, putting its green buying policies and consumer  guides onto a new environmental website to help businesses assess their eco-friendly options, learn why they might want to go green and read about Office Depot’s environmental strategies.

The consumer guides help people learn about certified products such as Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) paper, which is sourced from sustainable forests specifically managed to regenerate.

Those who just want to jump right to Office Depot’s green consumer offerings can go to the Greener Office Storefront. There you can find the most environmentally friendly products the office chain offers, such as:

• The house brand 100-percent post-consumer, recycled , FSC-certified “Enviro Copy” printer paper. This paper is bleached without environmentally harmful chlorine, sourced from post-consumer paper that comes from FSC forests. It gets solid ratings from early users and appears to be competitively priced. (Photo above, right.)
• Office Depot brand remanufactured toner cartridges, made from recycled parts and compatible with certain HP printers; and Office Depot brand remanufactured ink jet cartrdiges compatible with certain Canon printers.
• Office Depot Brand Recycled Quick Set Up Storage Boxes. Trust us, not long ago you couldn’t find such an item in a recycled version. Now here’s the house brand; it gets top marks from users and is reasonably priced. At $23.99 for a dozen, you won’t feel like this is a green rip off. (Photo below.)
• Foray brand 100-percent recycled construction paper (schools take note!) for $2.99 for 50 sheets, a bit more than you might pay for bottom-drawer construction paper, but this is nice stuff, along with having green credibility.

The only downside to the new arrangement seems to be that the order in which things appear on the web pages is not dictated by their shades of green. While shopping within Office Depot’s Greener Storefront, you must often scroll down past a row of mainstream, non-green “highest consumer rated” products to get to the green goods. This helpful auto-feature seems to defeat the purpose of trying to collect the greener products into one neat area.

One hopes that over time, more and more green products will make it into the “highest consumer rated” categories, thereby solving this glitch. But at this time, the intermingling makes for confusion on many of the results pages within the greener storefront; though conceivably some shoppers will want to compare apples and oranges as they navigate the growing world of eco-products.

Overall, however, Office Depot is to be commended for the consumer outreach and education they’re attempting here, not to mention making their own goals and corporate practices more transparent. (The site includes reams of info about Office Depot’s internal efforts to reduce waste and operate more eco-efficiently.)

Mostly importantly, though, the global chain, with more than 1,600 retail stores and a $4.6 billion online business, is exerting its clout to make more green products available and affordable by expanding its own Office Depot Green brands. Office supplies could use a good green makeover given the forests, plastics, inks and transportation involved in producing so many disposable office items.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media