Leading retailers will face a forceful consumer-based campaign from a new environmental group which wants to stop the sale of Australian wood and paper products derived from native forest timbers.
The group, calling itself Markets for Change, was launched yesterday, and has been preparing its campaign in secret for more than a year.
It will harness the power of online advocacy groups like GetUp to unleash direct pressure on retailers, in a break with past tactics of the anti-logging movement.
The group’s chief executive, Tim Birch, says Australian business has been slow to ”face up to its environmental responsibilities” compared with companies trading in Britain and Europe.
”If we look at the forest campaigns in Australia to date, they have been very much focused on the producers, the logging companies and the politics,” Mr. Birch told the Herald.
”The retailers - the market that’s driving the problem - has been largely absent from these discussions.”
Mr. Birch, the former forest co-coordinator for the Wilderness Society, is a veteran of campaigns abroad to save native forests in Indonesia, the Amazon basin and British Columbia.
He says the group’s donors want to remain anonymous but the operation was well enough funded to employ four people and several consultants.
The board of Markets for Change comprises two members of Greenpeace International, Tony Sadownichik in Amsterdam and Gavin Edwards in Hong Kong and the former head of Greenpeace in the Mediterranean, Ahmet Bektas, as well as the Canberra lawyer Julia Pitts.
The group released its first report, titled retailing the Forests, yesterday.
It argues that there is a direct link between ”the destruction of Australia’s native forests and the everyday consumer products on the shelves and showroom floors of many of Australia’s top retailers”.
The report identifies leading furniture retailers Forty Winks, Harvey Norman, Snooze, Sleep City, Domayne, Freedom Furniture and OzDesign among chains which it says sell products made from native forest wood.
In building products, it names Bunnings, Mitre 10, Home Timber and Hardware, Hudson Building Supplies, Perfect Timber Floors, and DecoRug among others.
Chains such as Office works, Woolworths, Australia Post, Office Choice, Target, IGA, Dick Smith and OfficeMax are criticized for stocking paper products made from native forest woodchips.
The report says logging is still permitted in 76 per cent of Australia’s native forests but that there is enough plantation timber available to replace all native forest products.
The report says it trawled through publications and websites of the 30 companies named in its report, and only three had publicly available forest procurement policies. Those three - Bunnings, OfficeMax and Hudson - fell short, it said, because the policies did not rule out the sale of products sourced from native forests.
The Herald was unable to contact most of the named retailers yesterday. However, Harvey Norman’s furniture manager, Roger Maguire, said his company had begun looking at a ”proper risk matrix to know which timbers are now from illegally forested areas”.He said the company had not publicized the measure because it was in its early stages, but acknowledged ”I think we need to be a bit more on the front foot.
‘Times are changing with the social media and the presence of these types of groups.”
He said a complete ban on native non-plantation timbers would ”put a lot of people out of work in Australia … we would need to research that more closely before we could give a response.”
