Organization: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company

Year: 2010

Description: WHEREAS: As a global provider of printing services, paper products provide significant raw materials for RR Donnelley’s products.  Forests are rapidly declining at a rate of 55 football fields per minute according to the United Nations and only about 20% of the world’s original forests remain undisturbed.
 
A 2007 report, Consuming Canada’s Boreal Forest, tracks the supply chain of our company’s paper to Canada’s Boreal forest, the largest remaining ancient forest left in North America. The Boreal is home to more than 30% of North America’s bird species and contains the largest remaining populations of woodland caribou and wolverines.  These and other species have declined significantly due to habitat loss, in part, from unsustainable logging.
 
The Boreal region also plays a vital role in mitigating climate change impacts by storing extensive amounts of carbon.  Forests store the equivalent of 175 years of global fossil fuel emissions, with Boreal forests storing the largest percentage of carbon.  Forest loss is responsible for 20-25% of total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions globally. 
 
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international network of climate scientists, has concluded that global warming is “unequivocal.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that greenhouse gases threaten Americans’ health.
 
Climate change impacts from deforestation and poor forest management can be reduced by increasing the use of recycled fiber and sourcing virgin fiber from well-managed forests harvested according to independent and internationally recognized sustainable forestry standards. 
 
FSC is the only independent forest certification system in the world accepted by the conservation, aboriginal and business communities. FSC is the world’s largest and fastest growing certification system, by hectares.
 
RR Donnelley has obtained FSC chain-of-custody certification for many of its facilities.  Chain-of-custody certification enables our company to offer, to those customers requesting it, products that meet FSC standards.  Chain-of-custody certification alone is not sufficient for ensuring that our company is purchasing sustainably harvested paper. 
 
Our company purchases paper that is certified to a range of certification schemes, as well as uncertified paper. Our company has not disclosed any baseline standards used to make purchasing decisions, and therefore may be purchasing significant quantities of paper from unsustainably harvested forests and endangered forests.
 
Protests across North America and Europe have targeted various companies’ paper sourcing practices.  Our company can mitigate reputational and operational risk by developing and implementing a sustainable paper purchasing policy and reporting progress on implementing the policy.  Many publishers, including Scholastic Inc., Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Time Inc., have developed and implemented sustainable paper purchasing policies. 
 
RESOLVED:  Shareholders request the Board to develop a sustainable paper purchasing policy, at reasonable cost and omitting proprietary information, by November 30, 2010, including plans for implementing the policy and reporting progress.
 
Supporting Statement: The policy should include the Company’s:
 
* definition and standards for identifying sustainable paper;
* goals and timeframes for increasing the use of recycled paper and paper certified to credible certification schemes; and
* estimating avoided greenhouse gas emissions from these activities.