School Specialty. Planning & Student Development

As the nation’s leading education company, School Specialty^® believes that protecting and preserving the environment is not only sound business practice, it is simply the right thing to do.

The result of the environmental policy has helped change our office environment as well as transform our production processes. The company continues to improve on efforts to eliminate waste and utilize more environmentally-friendly products and production methods.

A few of these efforts are:

• Use of environmentally-friendly soy inks
• Recycling of planner ancillaries including pouches, tabs, pagefinders, wall charts and other plastics
• Increased recycling of planner coils

Use of Recycled Content

A reasonable effort will be made to utilize paper that contains post-consumer recycled content (PCRC) in catalogs, marketing materials, proprietary products, packaging, and general business forms. Additionally, the paper must meet our customers’ expectations of the brand in terms of affordability, quality, and sustainable consistency.

Endangered Forests

We will not accept any paper manufactured with fiber obtained from forests that have been formally identified as endangered or “old growth” forests. This includes fiber sourced from the endangered forests of the boreal region of Canada and designated endangered forests.

In order to meet this standard, a reasonable effort must be made to ensure that fiber included in the paper used in our catalog production be obtained from forests that use environmentally friendly, sustainable forestry management practices. We will audit our paper suppliers annually for proof of environmentally friendly practices and sustainability of their papers’ fiber sources.

Paper suppliers must obtain their fiber from forests managed under a credible forest certification scheme wherever possible, or have procurement systems that are third party verified to a credible certification scheme. We recognize the following certification schemes as credible: Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Canadian Standards Association (CSA), Pan-European Forestry Certification (PEFC), and the American Tree Farm System (ATFS).

Responsible Use of Paper

We are committed to reducing the total paper fiber consumed through our marketing programs. Initiatives encouraged to achieve this standard include:

• Reduction of total catalog pages circulated through various circulation efficiency initiatives
• Retirement of redundant catalogs from acquisitions
  
• Effective customer list management practices and reduction of duplicate mailings
  
• Reduction of basis weights of paper used in catalogs
  
• Further development of web sites to reduce reliance on paper-based catalogs

Agendas and publishing do not utilize PCRC or non-boreal stock.