U Weekly. Serving The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio

Students demand better university paper policy

By Corey Spring

Somewhere deep in the Canadian wilderness there is a place called the Grassy Narrows First Nation where a community has lived off the land for thousands of years. Now, the livelihood of the Native Americans living in Grassy Narrows is being threatened, and a group of students say Ohio State is partially to blame.

Over the last decade, Grassy Narrows leaders have urged their government to halt clear-cut logging from their land. The community maintains that the logging violates their right to hunt, trap, and fish granted to them in federal treaties. The situation became so bad that in 2002 community members erected a road-block to stop logging trucks from entering their territory. Five years later, however, logging continues on the land beyond the reach of the community’s blockade.

Where does Ohio State fall into the mix? Wood logged from the region is manufactured into paper sold by OfficeMax – a major paper supplier to Ohio State University.

Students from a campus environmental group, Free the Planet at OSU are lobbying the university to commit to a “sustainable, socially responsible” paper purchasing policy that would not allow the purchase of paper made from Grassy Narrows (in addition to other measures), and they are pressuring the most public figure OSU has to support their cause: President E. Gordon Gee.

Tuesday morning, they took their case to Bricker Hall, rallying to stop the use of paper obtained from indigenous conflict areas and calling on the university to include more recycled content in the paper found on campus. As temperatures hit below freezing and plows cleared The Oval from the previous night’s snowfall, students chanted “Recycled paper we demand, get out of Grassy Narrows land.”

The proposal would also call for Ohio State to dramatically increase the amount of post consumer content (i.e. recycled material) throughout the university, as well as reducing OSU’s overall paper usage.

For its part, the university’s Business Operations Environmentally Responsible Purchasing Task Force said it agrees with the proposal in principle, and an official version is being drafted to present to the university’s administration. Sources close to the deal said they expected it to be announced shortly, possibly as soon as Thursday.

In addition to meeting with the Business Operations task force, members of the OSU chapter of Free the Planet have been circulating a petition online directed specifically at President Gee, urging him to support their cause and call for a new procurement policy. As of this writing, the group had collected over 2,200 signatures.

“If the Ohio State University truly aspires to be among the world’s truly great universities and you are among the most highly experienced university presidents in the nation,” the group’s petition, addressed directly to Gee, begins, “why then are you refusing to clean up your act and make OSU into an environmental leader?”

“We have such a large school that the university-wide policy has a real impact on the environment,” says second-year finance student Benjamin Winters along with his signature. “Make it one to be proud of.”

Support for the policy change has come in not only from campus and Columbus, but a scattering throughout the nation.

“I’m a graduate of the Univ. of Mich.,” says Dr. William Sneck to Gee next to his signature, “…and hope that as too often in football, you take the lead in this effort.”

This isn’t the first time the group of students has persuaded a large organization to reverse its policy. In December of 2006, Limited Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, announced it would adopt a paper policy that would prohibit its company’s catalogs from being printed on paper coming from Endangered Forests. The work was a combination of the students’ efforts as a local action team along with a national campaign lobbying the company. Incidentally, the CEO of the Limited Brands, Leslie Wexner, sits on the Board of Trustees at Ohio State.

Originally Published: February 13, 2008

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