Follett Bookstore

Fair Labor

Follett Higher Education Group has partnered with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to help ensure that the products sold in our campus bookstores are manufactured under ethical working conditions. The principles of the FLA echo the Follett Values we use in our everyday business, and we're excited to join them in their mission.

In 1995, we became the first academic retailer to develop standards for fair labor practices in the manufacturing of collegiate products. Through Follett's centralized buying practices, we have not only produced expanded product selections along with better quality and pricing for your bookstore, but we have gained greater control and influence over the sourcing of our products, including enforcement of our Code. Today, FHEG continues in that commitment through the Fair Labor Association, establishing a new benchmark for the bookstore industry in the demand for fair labor conditions.

We will encourage any vendor who sells more than $25,000 to Follett at cost on an annual basis to join the FLA and submit to its Code and monitoring. Currently 95% of all Follett clothing suppliers and more than 50% of our gift vendors are members of the FLA. Vendors that sell less than $25,000 to Follett will be subject to Follett's Vendor Labor Code of Conduct and monitoring through Global Social Compliance.

We envision a true synergy between the colleges and universities we serve, the Fair Labor Association and Follett in our commitment to improving working conditions for those employees who produce clothing and gifts for the collegiate market. More information about the mission of the Fair Labor Association and its efforts to protect workers' rights and improve working conditions worldwide may be found at http://www.fairlabor.org.

Energy

We consider energy part of our value chain; managing it strengthens our bottom line as an organization. But paying close attention to the energy we consume- and how we consume it- is about more than our bottom line. It's about ensuring a sustainable tomorrow. With that in mind, Follett evaluated every organization within our corporate family in order to develop standards and best practices that will ensure we are acting as responsible stewards of the environment.

Our organizational goals are to not only find the right suppliers at the right price, but to reduce our total energy consumption across our entire organization in order to conserve natural resources. Currently, a 5% reduction in energy consumption per year is our target goal.

Shipping Cartons

As you can imagine, when you ship nearly 20 million textbooks annually, you use a lot of shipping cartons. At Follett, we have addressed our use of shipping cartons in two ways: First, we use only cartons that have 35% post-consumer recycled content for every shipment. Second, not only are our cartons made from recycled materials, we also take great pains to recycle the cartons ourselves. For example, when we conduct book buybacks, we send cartons to the bookstores we serve. When these cartons are returned to our River Grove warehouse full of textbooks, we reuse them.

We employ disabled adults through an organization called El Valor, which is focused on the needs of the disabled, disenfranchised and the underserved. At El Valor, our returned shipping cartons are broken down, turned inside out and re-assembled. They are then sent back to our warehouse where we use them again before ultimately recycling them. Sometimes we receive cartons that cannot be re-used. We then shred these cartons and use them in lieu of styrofoam peanuts as packing material for our outbound textbook shipments.

Computers

Follett ensures that computers are properly disposed of and pose no hazards to the environment. All unusable equipment is disposed of through Sipi, a Chicago-based company that has exceeded all governmental regulations and is licensed by local, state and federal authorities. Sipi's goal is to conduct their business in a manner consistent with a clean environment.

Flooring

In every bookstore we renovate, we use Nexterra carpet backing. Nexterra is an industry-leading, high-performance PET backing made from 35% post-consumer content recycled water and soda bottles with an additional 50% from post-consumer recycled glass. The result? Each 24" x 24" tile saves ten 16-ounce bottles from the landfill. Even better, Nexterra tiles are themselves recyclable.

Lighting

Follett has implemented T5 fluorescent lighting wherever applicable in the college stores we serve. T5 fluorescent lighting represents the very latest in lighting technology, delivering up to 33% in energy savings versus traditional lighting. Because the T5 is smaller, it requires less glass, steel and phosphor to produce. The T5 meets stringent environmental regulations such as California's Title 24, ASHRAE 90.1 and IECC.

Construction Materials

Follett uses WoodstalkTM Fiberboard, which is made from wheat straw using polyurethane resin as a binder instead of the formaldehyde typically found in similar products. The result is that formaldehyde emissions are cut by as much as 97%. The wheat straw itself is a reclaimed resource; if it were not used in Woodstalk Fiberboard, the straw would have likely been burned, adding greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide to the atmosphere.

Woodstalk Fiberboard has received LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) credits from the U.S. Green Building Council in the following categories:

IEQ 4.4 and 4.5: Low-emitting materials
MR Credit 4.1 and 4.2: Recycled content
MR Credit 5.1 and 5.2: Local/regional materials
MR Credit 6: Rapidly renewable materials
DE Credit 1.1: Innovation in design

Textbook Recycling

Follett is committed to the buying and selling of used textbooks, not only as part of our business, but also to reduce the amount of natural resources used to create these books. Follett's Wholesale division buys back and recycles more than 11 million books annually. Follett Educational Services, which serves grades K-12, also recycles more than 4.8 million books annually. Books that are declared out-of-print or old editions are not destroyed, but sent to libraries and schools in developing countries through the Bridge to Asia program. Other corporate divisions recycle books through Books for Africa.

General Merchandise

In response to customer interest, our general merchandise department introduced a number of new environmentally-friendly products in a majority of our stores. Select writing instruments from Zebra and Environotes notebooks, filler paper, portfolios and composition notebooks from Roaring Spring were launched last year and remain an important part of our school supplies assortment. Select stores that carry art supplies can purchase Strathmore Windpower Series art paper and sketchpads from our art materials distributor.

New environmentally preferable supplies for 2008 are from Zebra, Pentel and Pilot covering pens, mechanical pencils and highlighters. In our convenience department, Seventh Generation Paper and Cleaning Products are being expanded to more stores.

Campus Participation & Support

In addition to ensuring that our facilities and policies are as "green" as possible, Follett participates in campus groups that are focused on sustainability. For example, at the University of Florida, our bookstore manager is an active participant in the UF Zero Waste Task Force, which was implemented by the university's Sustainability Committee. The task force also supports the "Green Textbook Initiative," an organization whose goal is to increase the number of educational publishers that use 30% post-consumer recycled content.

Commitment to Vendor Labor Code of Conduct

We know it's not enough to simply talk about one's values; one must demonstrate them. That's why Follett was the first academic retailer to develop strict guidelines for the vendors with whom we do business. And it's why you can be sure we buy only from officially licensed vendors who embrace our code.

In 1995, Follett became the first academic retailer to develop standards for fair labor practices in the manufacture of collegiate products. In doing so, we assumed a leadership position on the issue of child and sweatshop labor. Through a third party monitoring agency, Follett observes factories to ensure that no child or sweatshop labor is used to make products sold in our stores. This past summer, Follett selected ten factories to be monitored in the countries of El Salvador, China, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Columbia.

Monitoring of factories that produce items sold in Follett bookstores considers all provisions of the Follett Code of Conduct. Monitoring procedures for each provision of the code include observations of conditions in the factory, reviews of factory records and documents, inquiries of workers through confidential one-on-one interviews, and discussions with factory management. Monitors utilize a combination of procedures to corroborate information from each type of investigation to develop an understanding of conditions in the factory and compliance issues.

Provisions of the Follett Code of Conduct include:

Legal Compliance
Environmental Compliance
Wages and Benefits
Working Hours
Child Labor
Forced Labor
Health and Safety
Non-discrimination
Harassment and Abuse / Disciplinary Practices
Freedom of Association
Subcontracting
Verification - Monitoring Compliance
Communication and Notification Compliance
Follett also subscribes to the principles of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) as the vast majority of clothing vendors who provide us with the products we sell are members of the FLA. Their commitment to protecting workers' rights and improving working conditions worldwide also adds additional monitoring and verification that international labor standards are being upheld.

In addition to monitoring, we review reports from human rights organizations, labor groups, religious organizations and governments that provide monitoring data. We realize that supporting fair labor practices is an issue of great importance to our campus partners and our customers. More than that, it's simply the right thing to do.