The Home Depot

The Home Depot in 2002 announced a $1 million donation over five years to help The Nature Conservancy combat illegal logging and promote sustainable timber harvesting in Indonesia. The largest wood retailer in the United States intends to increase consumer demand for sustainable forest products and encourage other retailers to support product certification through its sale of certified wood products.

About Home Depot
Founded in 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer, operating more than 1,500 stores under the names Home Depot, EXPO Design Center, Floor Store, and HD Landscape Supply in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Home Depot is an innovator in the home improvement industry, offering an unprecedented level of service among warehouse professionals.

About this Partnership
The Conservancy's partnership with The Home Depot began with the Conservancy's discovery of a large population of wild orangutans on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo in Indonesia. The discovery increased the number of known orangutans worldwide by about 10% and offers conservationists a rare, hopeful opportunity to save these highly endangered primates.

The single greatest threat to these orangutans is habitat destruction: The local government had previously awarded this forestland to a timber company as part of a logging concession. To protect the orangutans, The Conservancy signed a joint declaration with the local government in the Berau District of East Kalimantan Province and with the Indonesian Minister of Forestry to commit all three parties to conserving and managing their habitat.

With The Home Depot's support, the Conservancy is beginning a 3-month demonstration of sustainable forestry and timber certification on a 500,000-acre site in the Berau District, which will expand to involve communities and timber companies throughout East Kalimantan.

Other Conservation Highlights
The Home Depot's conservation efforts extend well beyond this specific donation. In 1999, the company—which is the world's largest single buyer of wood products—announced it would give purchasing preference to wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council in order to phase out imports from endangered ecosystems like rain forests. Since then, The Home Depot has learned the origins of 8,900 of its nearly 50,000 wood products—all the way down to the blades on its ceiling fans.

The Home Depot reduced its imports from Indonesia by 70% because there was no third-party certification available there, and now receives less than 1% of its wood from Indonesia. Likewise, less than 0.15% of the company's wood products come from areas around the Brazilian Amazon Basin. With the support of The Home Depot—in addition to existing funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development—forest certification in Indonesia will begin to have an impact on both the environment and the market place.

View video of orangutans and learn more about this discovery and The Home Depot's involvement.