In a move that environmental awareness groups hail as victory, office supply chain Staples Inc. announced plans last week to move toward selling environmentally friendly paper products.

Staples announced new guidelines in which the company will attempt to average 30 percent post-consumer recycled content in all paper products, phase out purchases of paper products from endangered forests and create an environmental affairs division to report on the new guidelines' results.

The move comes following pressure from Free The Planet!and The Paper Campaign, coalitions of student environmental groups and citizens devoted to making recycled paper the marketplace norm.

Eco, an MSU student environmental group, participated in the campaign which coordinated student groups into local activism at nearby Staples stores.

Liisa Bergmann, an environmental policy senior and Eco member, said the fight to move the market toward recycled paper was often arduous, but wholly worthwhile.

"Corporations usually don't allow their leaders to be accessed by the public, so most of the calls were placed to consumer comment lines," she said.

The nationwide protest, which Eco had participated in since last fall, was culminated by the "grassroots victory" because of student activism at a local level, according to Beth Weinstein, field organizer of Free The Planet.

"I think that the reception was amazing," Weinstein said. "It has come on the heels of two years of grassroots pressure."

Weinstein added that Staples' announcement was the direct result of efforts by student groups such as Eco.

"There was no way this victory would've happened without groups like Eco at Michigan State," Weinstein said. "They're really the ones who won this campaign."

Staples spokesman Owen Davis said the office supplier was happy to oblige, citing Staples' cooperative effort with environmental groups to cement the new agreements.

"The development was a collaborative one with environmental groups, shareholders and providers," Davis said.