Walmart has quietly switched its entire line of wooden outdoor furniture from nyatoh, a wood logged from the endangered old-growth rainforests of Indonesia, to FSC-certified eucalyptus, a plantation wood often grown in tropical areas.

Rainforest Relief first contacted Walmart about their outdoor furniture shortly following our first Outdoor Furniture Day of Action on April 30, 2005.

We eventually were contacted again in 2007 and discussed the issue with Walmart.com's furniture buyer as well as people within Walmart involved in 'greening' the company.

Both parties agreed to pursue the issue and we were told they would contact us again after checking into the information we provided about nyatoh. We did not hear back.

This month, we were pleasantly surprised to see that all Walmart.com's outdoor furniture lines are now constructed of FSC-certified eucalyptus.

While eucalyptus plantations may have a significant impact — in particular, they consume a lot of groundwater — the use of this wood for timber has a much lower impact than using tropical hardwoods from old-growth forests.

Better solutions for outdoor furniture are recycled plastic and domestic second-growth woods such as oak and white cedar. Hopefully, as Walmart continues to go 'green', they'll consider completing the shift towards truly sustainable furniture.