Ron Jarvis, VP for Environmental Innovation at Home Depot, presented the process of making the environmental issue part of a corporation's activity. Jarvis explained that in 1989, environmental products collected dust at the back of stores and were more expensive and usually less effective than other products. In 1996, the company received an award from President Clinton, and in 1998, the corporation officially joined a rally for the first time, against the marketing of Old Growth Wood. In his opinion, in order to match the views expressed at the rally, they had to learn the tree market in every country exporting trees to the US, and decide whether the trees from that country match the environmental criteria they had taken on. They actually had to research the source of some 9,000 wood products, which took two years. As part of the project the chain cooperated with environmental organizations and shared information with them. As of today, some 94% of the chain's wood products originate in North America, which has a positive forestation rate. According to Jarvis, the stores themselves are energy efficient – which saves millions of dollars a year. The chain also encourages shifting to CFL light-bulbs, which are more efficient. Even so, this kind of bulb has a small amount of mercury and therefore the chain decided to collect the used bulbs for recycling. "It cost us lots of money, but when taking resale profits and more customers arriving at stores, it was profitable." According to him, the recycling project saves Home Depot $20 million a year.
Three years ago the chain started its resource-saving education project. The project was subsidized, and not only did the project end up not costing any money, it led to a profit of $16 million. Jarvis adds that in 2007, chain policy was responsible for $606 million saved on American citizens' electricity bills.
MK Ophir Pines-Paz, Head of the Knesset's Internal Affairs and Environment Committee: "For a long time now, we haven't been dealing with the quality of the environment, but rather with protecting the environment. The feeling around the world is that everything we say has been done already ten years ago. The schedules, according to experts worldwide, are getting shorter. Today the opinion is that we have between seven and ten years to take some strategic action that will stop Global Warming. Israel is expected to become a desert; its shoreline is expected to flood; there will be large numbers of internal refugees – I am disregarding inner and regional conflicts (what's going on in Sudan