Willow's Pagan Place

Stone Forest Industries

WHO IS THIS COMPANY AND WHAT ARE ITS PLANS FOR LA SIERRA

---FACT SHEET---

Stone Container Corporation, of which Stone Forest Industries is a subsidiary, is the world leader in paper bag and cardboard box production, with operations throughout the United States and Honduras.

Corporate Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
Regional Office: Raton, New Mexico
Colorado Operations: South Fork, Colorado

Stone Forest Industries presence in Colorado includes large timber harvest and "stud mill" operations:

Stone Forest is by far the biggest timber operation in Southern Colorado and is the second largest corporate timber presence in the state.
The "stud mill" is the biggest in southern Colorado with approximately 200 employees in South Fork district operations.
Fifty percent of the mill's yearly timber supply comes from below-cost sales on Rio Grande National Forest Lands.
The South Fork Mill annually consumes 28 to 30 million board feet of timber.
Included in Stone Forest's below cost national forest timber purchases are old growth stands in the Sand Bench area.

ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLATIONS

The EPA reports that in five years (1987-1992) eight of Stone's mills discharged 127,583,169 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, water, and land.
Stone has violated anti-pollution laws in fifteen states where it has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and is currently facing a $2 million dollar fine for violations of the Clean Water Act in Snowflake, Arizona.
In the 1980's, Roger Stone, head of the company, enlisted the help of "junk bond" king Michael Milken to make Stone Container into a global corporation. Stone's net sales increased from $411 million in 1981 to $5.4 billion in 1991, but the corporation is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with a $4 billion debt.
Stone Container generates more toxic waste in a day than a community the size of San Luis will in fifty years.
From 1986 through 1991, the federal government cited Stone for 706 violations of worker health and safety standards. Twelve of these citations involved "willful" violations in which the company showed "intentional disregard" for the health and safety of workers. Three workers were killed in 1991 due to the company's dangerous disregard for safety regulations.
Stone's South Fork mill is having difficulty fulfilling its demand for logs. Timber harvest quotas on the Rio Grande and San Juan National Forests have been reduced from 32 million board feet to 11 million board feet. Stone wants 25-28 million board feet a year. The Taylor Ranch contract provides an outlet for Stone to get back a part of its quota at a time when the feds are saying "No" to previous harvest levels deemed harmful to the environment and economy of the San Luis Valley.
Will la sierra trees become saw mill scraps to be used as "hog fuel" to operate a wasteful boiler in Montana that produces cancer-causing dioxins and other toxic sludge?

SOUTH OF THE BORDER EXPLOITATION

Whether seeking timber sales in the Third World or exploiting immigrant workers back home in the U.S.A., Stone Container Co. is rapidly becoming a major player in the international pulp and paper industry.

On September 25, 1991, Stone Container signed an exclusive 40-year concession with the Honduran government to log the tropical forests of the Mosquitia region. The agreement gave Stone the right to cut 2.47 million acres in northeastern Honduras.
The Mosquitia, relatively untouched by the ravages of resource extraction, is home to native peasant communities that have been careful stewards of the land, water, and wildlife.
The unprecedented 40-year concession involved a proposal to export wood chips to paper mills in the U.S. and other countries.
Stone Container claimed it would create 3,000 jobs, double Honduras's foreign exchange earnings from forest products in three years, and "improve" the forests through a management policy of selective harvesting and reforestation.
Careful study of the cut-for-export plan by professional foresters and independent economists revealed all these claims to be false. Stone Container, one critic noted, promises anything to get its hands on increasingly rare tropical pine forests. On October 7, 1991, the national College of Professional Foresters declared the agreement illegal and a violation of federal laws establishing the Mosquitia Forest Development Corporation.
In November, 1991, under pressure from national and international groups, Stone admitted that it had not prepared an environmental impact study of the area as required by law.
By February, 1992, thousands of Hondurans were staging weekly and twice-weekly demonstrations and road blockades.
On February 27, 1992, the government announced that negotiations with Stone Container had been terminated for "technical reasons" and the "public interest."
In the United States, Stone Container hires many immigrants for its timber and saw-mill crews. The workers are vulnerable to the corporation's policies involving low wages, poor benefits, lack of union representation, and hazardous working conditions. Stone Forest timber crews on the Taylor Ranch are reportedly staffed by Latin American immigrants who are paid less than U.S. workers.

(SOURCES: Grace Herndon (1991) Cut and Run: Saying Goodbye to the Last Great Forests in the West. Telluride, CO: Western Eye Press; Dan McNully; EPA; Task Force on Multinational Corporations)

Reprinted from La SIERRA , Fall/Winter, 1996, Page 12.

Please send comments or suggestions to Mike Lewinski at oikos@bcn.boulder.co.us. If you don't have access to email, you can do this through the BCN organization comment form.