Office Depot announced further achievements in the area of environmental sustainability and performance. The company will both build and open its first LEED®-certified retail store in Austin, TX in mid-2008.

 Simultaneously, Office Depot continues to refine its master set of drawings and specifications that comprise its store prototype and will investigate having the format LEED-certified as well. Office Depot has already piloted the green building design concept of “daylight harvesting” in its Greensboro, NC, store. This concept removes, on average, 250,000 lbs of carbon and greenhouse gases from the environment each year through high-performance daylighting.

“Office Depot has successfully implemented a number of environmental construction initiatives over the past few years,” said Edward Costa, vice president of construction for Office Depot. “We see both our membership in the U.S. Green Building Council and our long-term strategy of having a retail store prototype LEED-certified as examples of Office Depot’s environmental vision to increasingly buy green, be green and sell green.”

For more information on Office Depot’s environmental initiatives and to view the Company’s 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report, please visit: www.officedepot.com/corporatecitizenship and www.officedepot.com/environment.