Bank of America, the nation’s largest retail bank, and one of the world’s largest consumers of paper products, has revised its long-standing paper policy to give it real teeth.
Its new initiative, developed with leading environmental NGOs Metafore and Environmental Defense, aims to reduce virgin fiber demand, protect endangered forests and promote sustainable forestry practices.
In addition to simply encouraging best practices that protect endangered forests, the new policy aligns with the bank’s forest practices lending policy. Said Greg Taylor, Supply Chain Management executive, “Suppliers of paper products to the bank must remain in compliance with applicable laws and regulations governing timber harvesting and ensure their third party suppliers also comply with applicable laws and regulations.”
The new procurement policy, implemented on April 1, has three primary goals:
(1) Source Reduction and Recycling — Minimize the bank’s consumption of paper products containing virgin wood fiber, to reduce demand on forests. (2) Sustainable Forest Practices — Ensure that source forests from which virgin wood fiber is procured are managed using environmentally preferable practices. (3) Protection of Endangered Forests — Require the bank’s suppliers of paper products to identify and appropriately manage endangered and high conservation value forests.
Said Environmental Defense senior economist Robert Bonnie, “These efforts will help protect forest ecosystems, conserve natural resources and reduce pollution. Bank of America’s new policy is a big step forward for the financial services industry, and we hope other firms will follow its lead.”
As part of the policy, the bank will continue its existing efforts to reduce paper consumption, maximize recycled content where paper elimination is not feasible, and recycle the paper it uses in internal operations and receives from external sources.
During the period in which the bank’s assets have grown from $670 billion in 2000 to more than $1 trillion in 2004, it has decreased the amount of paper used in internal operations by 32 percent.
To reduce paper sent to outside parties, it now offers online banking customers the option of electronic statements in place of paper statements, for which over 1 million customers have signed up. In 2004, the bank recycled 28,268 tons of paper, effectively recycling all the paper it uses internally, plus the same amount again received from external sources.
In 2004, 70 percent of the paper purchased by the bank contained recycled content, at an average of 20 percent post-consumer content. The bank has set a goal that 90 percent of total paper purchases contain a minimum of 20 percent post-consumer recycled content by 2006.
Regarding forest practices, the bank will not align with suppliers engaged in the conversion of high conservation value forests or natural forest ecosystems to tree farms or plantations, on any scale, on lands that they own or manage. The bank will require its suppliers to work with their third-party suppliers of wood fiber to encourage and monitor compliance with conversion requirements and promote retention of high conservation value forests and natural forest ecosystems.
To protect endangered forests, Bank of America will require suppliers of paper products to warrant that neither their products nor product inputs, whether sourced from internal operations or third party suppliers, were derived from the harvesting of primary tropical moist forests, or primary forests in temperate or boreal forest regions that are not managed using sustainable forestry practices as verified by an independent third party audit.
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