Over at the Sierra Club Radio there is a great podcast on Victoria’s Secret: dirty little secret!  They’ve interviewed Kristi Chester Vance from Forest Ethics which has just won a huge campaign to get V.S. to transform their naughty ways!

I had no idea Victoria’s Secret mailed out a million catalogs a DAY!  They are largely contributing to one of our best natural defenses against global warming being deforested.  Who knew your panties could cause so much destruction!  So how did they get Vicky to change her ways, well they realized something very important, go after a company’s brand and not it’s bottom line.  Give a company a bad reputation and eventually it will begin to show in the numbers.

The objective was to get V.S. to use more recycled paper.  They negotiated with the Vice-President, emailed, had call-ins, and store protests.  All this worked!  V.S. has now agreed to 10% post-consumer recycled paper on it’s regular catalogs and 80% for clearance catalogs which is about a 10th of what they mail out.  They will stop sourcing from endangered forests, put a million dollars into research, use FSC certified paper and have an annual public independent audit of their environmental practices.

I was telling all this to a friend as we browsed our latest catalog, (yes I am part of the problem) and she said what is the big deal?  Well, paper production is the 4th largest user of fossil fuel!  But ask any guy who has ever received a gift from me, I always wrap their gift in tearsheets from my catalogs.  That’s recycling!