ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how B&Q, Texas Homecare, Do It All, Homebase, Great Mills and Wickes agreed and implemented a joint policy with the World Wide Fund for Nature to source all their wood products sold from well-managed forests. The subsequent spiralling of the initiative from a handful of companies in the early 1990s to a group of 86 companies, including Tesco, Habitat and Tarmac, by 1998 indicates its importance to managers and policy-makers concerned with greener purchasing in a variety of trade sectors. The chapter outlines some of the common themes in the implementation of this policy. In doing this, it aims to portray the benefits of collaboration on greener purchasing initiatives: between buyers and suppliers; between competing companies; and between companies and environmental groups. Analytic decision-making on environmental policy is often assumed to be characterised by structure, consistency, explicit definitions and bounded choices.
