Cut Down on Paper & Save Trees
There is of course an element of truth in the above remark, in the same way that if you stop breathing then there will be (slightly) more air to go around. The basis of this greatly over-used maxim really treats that trees are cut down to make paper, which is correct, for a given value of both ‘trees’ and ‘correct’.
Paper comes in many guises: from that which you might reach for to blow your nose on, to your daily newspaper; the vast and varied wallpapers available at your local edge of town D.I.Y. emporium, to the cardboard box that your new 56” plasma screen 4K television arrived in; to the microwaveable box that holds your ‘oven ready’ meal that you have to partake of because you spent so long reading the idiot guide that came with the new TV, that you haven’t time to cook 'proper' food!
Paper and paper products are all around us and in everyday use, sometimes without realising it or simply taken for granted (what do you think of the woodgrain effect on your office desk or laminated flooring? It’s printed on paper which is then bonded to a wood substitute to look like ‘the real thing’) . Virtually all paper is made from naturally occurring cellulose fibres – linear polysaccharide of beta(1→4) linked D-glucose units (phew!), typified by the chemical symbol C6H10O5 -n for the scientifically minded. The greatest source of this material around the globe (other than grass in its many varieties) is naturally occurring wood, i.e. trees. Oh dear, already some readers are beginning to get steamed-up with mental images of the destruction of the tropical rain forest, but please, stay with me on this one.
The second most important source of these cellulose fibres is recycled waste paper and board, which can be anything from yesterday's newspapers (no longer permitted for the wrapping of fish and chips in the U.K.) and that cardboard box that your 56” plasma T.V. came in that we met earlier. Plus, there are the ‘trade’ waste sources of recyclable paper and board, e.g. waste from printing companies, over-issue newspapers and magazines; and then there’s the endless barrage of ‘junk mail’ that daily falls (or should that be ‘pours’) through your letterbox or out of your Sunday newspaper, which you put to one side ready for your next trip to the municipal recycling centre, along with your empty wine bottles, baked bean tins (actually made of steel rather than ‘tin') and lager cans (aluminium). Some Local Authorities do some of this work for you and have regular collections of these valuable recyclable materials, what's called 'kerbside recovery', but from a papermakers perspective there are dangers within that enterprise, of which there is more to tell if you see me after class. (The watchword is co-mingled)
There are many other naturally occurring sources of cellulose fibre across the globe, but their usage is dependent on locality, end-product, and guaranteed availability. So for the sake of this article, let us go back to the most general source, wood, or better yet, trees. Trees grow on every continent on Earth (Antarctica excepted), and are of many and varied types – some yet to be discovered and identified. Of course, in The West, if you are doing one of those word association tests and the psychiatrist says ‘tree’ you might think of a majestic Oak, or a Horse Chestnut, or a Willow dangling its branches into the slowly drifting, crystal-clear waters of a country stream. Maybe even a pine tree, the Larch, the mighty Scots Pine, leaping from tree to tree......
If however your inquisitor were to say ‘tree for making paper’ in our metaphorical word association test, your mind might conjure-up those images of huge bulldozers ripping trees from the tropical forest, to the sound of chain-saws and their horrid rise and fall ‘burring’, drowning-out the shrieks of the displaced Gibbons and Orang Utans – basically, the rape of Sumatra (ten or fifteen years ago it would have been Amazonia but the focus has shifted, though the problem in South America remains and if anything has worsened!)
As far as making paper and board are concerned, the vast majority of trees ripped from the tropical rain forest are of little or no use for papermaking. They are hardwoods, harder even than Birch, Beech, even Eucalyptus, which (along with a few others) are what papermakers think of as hard woods. Tropical hardwoods, such as Mahogany, Walnut, Teak, Ipe, etc. are too hard, and can be up to 120 years old in those visions you have in mind, and to get that old they have matured relatively slowly and their cellulose fibres are short and very densely packed, which is what makes them 'hard' woods. This is ideal for furniture, wall panelling, real wooden ‘parquet’ floors, old-fashioned policeman’s truncheons, and many other uses where quite often a non-tropical hardwood timber would do just as well, but hey, these tropical forest trees are just there, waiting to be ripped out of the ground or hacked down, anyway.
Add to this, some foreign Governments can be ‘persuaded’ to give you a licence to level a given 5000 hectare patch of forest, even if the country is under the watchful eye of some bothersome NGO's or bunch of tree-hugging hippies. And if no-one is looking, let’s go and cut them down anyway and hope we get away with it.
Those last few sentences were an attempt at irony, because even as someone from the paper industry at large, I have been a conservationist for longer than I have had pulp running through my veins, and conservation and papermaking in the same sentence is not an oxymoron, in fact, the paper industry has been responsible for supporting and expanding much of the valuable work of organisations such as FSC, PEFC and SFI (see footnotes) that identifies the source of the timber so long as it has been ethically ‘farmed’, from a conservation perspective, and NOT ripped from the loving embrace of an Amazonian or Borneo tribesman.
Trees used in papermaking are from the temperate regions of the globe, though there are pine and eucalyptus plantations in South America where once stood tropical rain forest, but it was destroyed for timber, or farming land for cattle rearing (so where did you think your Fray Bentos corned beef came from? Fray Bentos is a place, not just another trade name) or cash crops, all of which failed after a year or two because the soil is basically so poor (think of the roots of the buttress rooted tropical trees that are so near the surface and spread over such a vast area). Then when the rains came and washed away what little soil there was, and areas the size of Wales are de-forested each week, month, or year depending on your information source and miles and miles of once lush forest is turned into muddy, virtually sterile desert.
Then some Sylviculturalists (that’s Tree Scientists to you and me) came along and said “Why don’t we plant trees there that we can use, crop within just ten years or so, replant, and crop again, and so on?” That way the soil gets enriched, we get trees for timber and paper-making, and a degree of habitat restoration is achieved, albeit an environmental monocultural. Plus, for every so many ‘farmed’ trees that have a relatively short cropping cycle, we will also plant ‘X’ many tropical hardwood trees, and even create ‘islands’ of such trees and ‘tree highways’ between them so the wildlife can resettle. And here’s the ‘funny’ part, these tree lovers were not from WWF, Friends of the Earth, or Greenpeace – they were all too busy wringing their hands and weeping bitter tears rather than putting forward recovery and re-forestation plans (witness Malaysia's forest policy pre-2009) -- these ‘radical’ scientists were from timber, pulp and paper companies! It worked too. Aside from the illegal logging that still goes on regardless anywhere that’s hot and wet – dependant on whether the country in question is run by a questionable government, or whether or not the native Indians have shot the loggers first – aside from that, ‘tree farming’, inspected, approved, and labelled by people like FSC, PEFC or SFI, is an environmentally and financially rewarding enterprise in South America, Viet Nam, Tropical Africa, Sri Lanka, the list goes on, largely unnoticed.
In the Far East (Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo et al) the destruction of the rain forest and all the unbearable habitat and environmental problems that it brings, has nothing to do with the pulp and paper industry, although there is a question mark over that word ‘nothing’. Asia has a burgeoning population, a growing economy, and a huge demand for paper products. While most pulp and paper companies from that part of the World do not commission the felling of tropical forest, they do buy the wood from so-called middle-men, and thus they can be said to have ‘sap on their hands’ if not blood. Some pulp companies actually have logging companies as subsidiaries, but you have to be something of a Sherlock Holmes to find out.
In The West we are equally to blame because we continue to buy paper and goods made from paper and board that originates in these places (especially Indonesia, and I'm sorry Mr Shengfu Wu, China). Western book publishers are also to blame because, whereas a few years ago most European book publishers deserted Western Europe for the cheap-labour economies of Eastern Europe. Today if you look inside the cover of way too many books, you will find they are printed in China which of course means on Chinese papers! Even a fantastic book that my belovèd daughter purchased from the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) at VAST expense, listing all the plants and animals that are endangered on this Earth (what used to be called The Red Book, but this was gloriously illustrated on coated paper) was printed in China on non-certified paper! Oh, IUCN, how you missed an opportunity, and have gone so far down in my estimation it is difficult to see you now as the 'authority' you once were! When are the buyers in publishing houses going to wake-up to THEIR responsibilities to the environment. Personally I boycott books printed in the Far East on uncertified paper whenever I can, but when the IUCN miss-a-trick what hope does Joe Public stand of forcing change?
Thinking back to the cattle ranches that replaced the Amazon Rain Forest, look for something called Palm Oil in the ingredients/contents of the products you buy each week at your local supermarket. Much of the areas denuded of tropical (hardwood) rain forest are being replanted with relatively fast growing palm trees, for the sake of the oil that is extracted from the ‘fruit’. Further, with the worry over climate change and the effect that carbon-dioxide plays, there is an international demand for bio-fuels. For bio-fuels read diesel mixed with palm oil. As for electric cars etc. forget it! How is the electricity generated? Fossil fuels largely. How about instead, dropping the pressure on governments to promote bio-fuels and electric cars, and go for Hydrogen Fuel-Cell technology instead!
Today, aside of the local need for fuel or space, or even just an income, most of the tropical ‘illegal’ logging is being carried-out to clear land for Palm Oil plantations. The darned stuff is in whatever you spread on your toast in the mornings, and in the soap you wash your hands with. It’s in shampoo and it’s in bars of chocolate. It is truly a ‘wonder’ ingredient, but for the destruction of forests, and forest dwellers livelihoods, that has to occur to produce it. It is planted as a mono-culture crop, so there are no tropical trees left within a plantation for the displaced wildlife to return to, and even if there were, these Palm Oil plantations are so vast that whatever wildlife managed to eke-out an existence on some miraculously un-cut tree, would be so isolated it could neither thrive or breed. Perhaps just as bad, local hunters and poachers would have a ‘captive’ source for bush meat, and in due course, illegally logged timber as well.
Trees, even in mono-culture commercial forests, absorb carbon-dioxide from the air, turn it into wood, and ‘breathe out’ oxygen. The Amazonian Rainforest was at one time called ‘The Lungs of the World’. Best Practice forestry now looks dimly on mono-culture forests anyway, and expects measures to be taken to ensure a good, proportionate, mix of trees (within a commercial framework) so that there is hope for wildlife to continue to flourish – anything from troops of Howler Monkeys to rare Orchids, exotic butterflies to Birds of Paradise.
A worry is the use of so-called newer bio-fuels. Drax power station in the U.K.–the U.K.'s biggest emitter of CO2, are (2018) shouting loud that, when once they were truly massive users of coal, now they are far more 'green' by converting to the use of bio-feul pellets. My question would be "So how do you obtain your bio-fuel pellets?" The answer would be that they are shipped across the Atlantic on truly huge barges, from manufacturing mills that illegally clear-cut areas of old-growth swamp forest in the southern states of the U.S.A. In short, destroy the ecology, use lots of energy to make the pellets, ship them all the way across the Atlantic on vessels that burn the grossest heavy fuel oil, then burn the pellets in a power station to create electricity. Is that really what we have come to in 'green energy' sourcing?
But let us not lose sight of the fact that the majority of Western pulp (and thereafter, paper) is made from pine, Eucalyptus, Silver Birch, Aspen, and a few others, which are grown in the West, commercially, from Finland to Portugal, and from Russia to Alaska. A great number of these trees are in fact grown for much needed timber, for building, and the pulp industry takes the stragglers, the side branches, those parts of a tree that it would not be economical to turn into floor boards or roof trusses, as well as the waste-wood from the timber mills.
When it comes to recycled paper, for a given value of the word ‘recycled’, there have been huge advances, even in as recently as the turn of the twenty-first century, and now so much of the newsprint is made from genuine recycled waste papers and magazines, that at times there is not enough of it ‘to go round’. Likewise waste cardboard, from cornflakes boxes to corrugated cartons. These are recycled, along with mixed waste paper not suitable for newsprint production, for the production of the brown papers used to make the top and bottom layers of corrugated board, as well as the more straw coloured corrugated ‘fluting’ middles. Again, a lot of the time there just isn’t enough waste to go round, and whose fault is that? The concerned public for not doing their share of recycling, perhaps?
Thus, I hope I have shown that cutting down on paper does not save trees, unless you take into account the trees that were grown especially for that purpose (‘farmed’ trees), and the forests where they grew are re-planted ready for the next crop in ten, twenty, or however many years it takes – foresters take ‘the long view’. Not using paper, though I often wonder what ‘we’ would use instead for most applications, does not save The Planet, quite the reverse, commercial forestry absorbs the demon CO2 and consequently helps save The Planet. Growing trees, that is to say trees that are in the process of growing, absorb two or three times more carbon from the atmosphere than do mature forests. One person has stated that the best thing an individual can do is to build a library (or even a bookshelf) and fill it with books printed on truly responsibly sourced papers. Why? Well, the trees have had a good life and have been very valuable in turning CO2 into oxygen whilst retaining the carbon as paper fibre, and if you keep the book rather than burning it, you, as an individual have 'carbon-locked' that pollutant forever (one hopes).
'Carbon Sequestration’, which has got to be better than the Norwegian idea of somehow capturing carbon from industrial pollution and pumping it into under-sea pockets or caverns. When you go shopping for paper for your home or office inkjet or laser printer, look for the FSC label (or others), or if you insist on using re-cycled paper, that’s fine too, re-cycled office papers have come a long way from those which were not really made from ‘true’ recycled waste, or those grey, limp, full of stray flecks, recycled papers that looked and acted most of the time little better than toilet tissue! Look for the Blue Angel mark, or the FSC Recycled mark. There are excellent qualities on the shelf that you can be proud to put your environmentally conscious name to, your own as an individual, or that of your company if you buy for a business or organisation.
Are you up to your ankles in junk mail and almost any other waste paper? Recycle it! If you have the opportunity, segregate your waste paper, keeping separate quantities of old newspapers and magazines, from junk mail, envelopes with windows, mail-order catalogues, cardboard boxes, cornflakes boxes, etc. etc. The waste paper merchants (or your Local Authority who have quotas to meet) will love your for that little bit of extra effort. For instance, a 'window' envelope will general be removed from the waste-stream and burnt in toto , because that window is probably plastic based and it would be to expensive to employ operatives to tear the window out for the sake of the valuable fibre in the paper. If before you put your window envelopes in the recycling bin, tear them in half, and ditch the window. If you are the Environmental Officer for a Company (or organisation) it is now part of your ‘job spec.’ (or should be) to minimise waste, and to see that any waste is properly recycled so only buy window envelopes that can be recycled – Your Planet Needs You!
As an individual, keep an eye out for those goods that you buy that contain palm oil. You will have a terrific job to avoid them completely, but where there is a similar product available that has less, or better yet, no, Palm Oil in it’s list of ingredients, buy that one instead. If you feel strongly about it (and you should) write to the Managing Director of the company that makes or brands that bar of soap or chocolate and ask them to stop using palm oil and go back to whatever it was they used to use. If they say it would be too expensive, that’s just nonsense, and ask “Too expensive for who?”. The real answer is surely, "Too expensive for The Planet"!
Footnote:
FSC - Forest Stewardship Council:
FSC is an international, non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world's forests. It was founded in 1993 in response to public concern about deforestation and demand for a trustworthy wood-labelling scheme. There are national working groups in 28 countries. It is supported by NGOs including WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Woodland Trust. www.fsc.org
PEFC - Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes:
The PEFC Council is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation, founded in 1999 which promotes sustainably managed forests through independent third party certification. The PEFC provides an assurance mechanism to purchasers of wood and paper products that they are promoting the sustainable management of forests.
PEFC is a global umbrella organisation for the assessment of and mutual recognition of national forest certification schemes developed in a multi-stakeholder process. These national schemes build upon the inter-governmental processes for the promotion of sustainable forest management, a series of on-going mechanisms supported by 149 governments in the world covering 85% of the world's forest area. www.pefc.org
SFI (Sustainable Forest Initiative):
SFI, Inc. is a non-profit organization devoted to improving sustainable forest management in the US and Canada through the Sustainable Forestry Initiative program. The SFI program is now fully independent. On January 1, 2007, a new, fully independent organization, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Inc. (SFI, Inc.) was created to direct all elements of the SFI® program.
This independence solidifies the SFI program’s strong market position as one of the world’s leading forest certification programs.
The multi-stakeholder Board of Directors of SFI, Inc. is the sole governing body over the SFI Standard and all aspects of the program, including chain of custody certification and labelling, marketing and promotion. The diversity of the board members reflects the variety of interests in the forestry community. Board representatives come from environmental and conservation organizations, public officials, professional and academic groups, forest products industry, independent logging professionals and forest landowners. This balance ensures that the SFI Program protects the economic, environmental and social needs of our forests and communities. www.aboutsfi.org
There are many other initiatives aimed at the paper industry, from the EU Eco Label (EU Flower), the Nordic Swan, the German Blue Angel, the British NAPM Recycled Mark, and the European Grade Finders Recycled Content scoring system.
Paper comes in many guises: from that which you might reach for to blow your nose on, to your daily newspaper; the vast and varied wallpapers available at your local edge of town D.I.Y. emporium, to the cardboard box that your new 56” plasma screen 4K television arrived in; to the microwaveable box that holds your ‘oven ready’ meal that you have to partake of because you spent so long reading the idiot guide that came with the new TV, that you haven’t time to cook 'proper' food!
Paper and paper products are all around us and in everyday use, sometimes without realising it or simply taken for granted (what do you think of the woodgrain effect on your office desk or laminated flooring? It’s printed on paper which is then bonded to a wood substitute to look like ‘the real thing’) . Virtually all paper is made from naturally occurring cellulose fibres – linear polysaccharide of beta(1→4) linked D-glucose units (phew!), typified by the chemical symbol C6H10O5 -n for the scientifically minded. The greatest source of this material around the globe (other than grass in its many varieties) is naturally occurring wood, i.e. trees. Oh dear, already some readers are beginning to get steamed-up with mental images of the destruction of the tropical rain forest, but please, stay with me on this one.
The second most important source of these cellulose fibres is recycled waste paper and board, which can be anything from yesterday's newspapers (no longer permitted for the wrapping of fish and chips in the U.K.) and that cardboard box that your 56” plasma T.V. came in that we met earlier. Plus, there are the ‘trade’ waste sources of recyclable paper and board, e.g. waste from printing companies, over-issue newspapers and magazines; and then there’s the endless barrage of ‘junk mail’ that daily falls (or should that be ‘pours’) through your letterbox or out of your Sunday newspaper, which you put to one side ready for your next trip to the municipal recycling centre, along with your empty wine bottles, baked bean tins (actually made of steel rather than ‘tin') and lager cans (aluminium). Some Local Authorities do some of this work for you and have regular collections of these valuable recyclable materials, what's called 'kerbside recovery', but from a papermakers perspective there are dangers within that enterprise, of which there is more to tell if you see me after class. (The watchword is co-mingled)
There are many other naturally occurring sources of cellulose fibre across the globe, but their usage is dependent on locality, end-product, and guaranteed availability. So for the sake of this article, let us go back to the most general source, wood, or better yet, trees. Trees grow on every continent on Earth (Antarctica excepted), and are of many and varied types – some yet to be discovered and identified. Of course, in The West, if you are doing one of those word association tests and the psychiatrist says ‘tree’ you might think of a majestic Oak, or a Horse Chestnut, or a Willow dangling its branches into the slowly drifting, crystal-clear waters of a country stream. Maybe even a pine tree, the Larch, the mighty Scots Pine, leaping from tree to tree......
If however your inquisitor were to say ‘tree for making paper’ in our metaphorical word association test, your mind might conjure-up those images of huge bulldozers ripping trees from the tropical forest, to the sound of chain-saws and their horrid rise and fall ‘burring’, drowning-out the shrieks of the displaced Gibbons and Orang Utans – basically, the rape of Sumatra (ten or fifteen years ago it would have been Amazonia but the focus has shifted, though the problem in South America remains and if anything has worsened!)
As far as making paper and board are concerned, the vast majority of trees ripped from the tropical rain forest are of little or no use for papermaking. They are hardwoods, harder even than Birch, Beech, even Eucalyptus, which (along with a few others) are what papermakers think of as hard woods. Tropical hardwoods, such as Mahogany, Walnut, Teak, Ipe, etc. are too hard, and can be up to 120 years old in those visions you have in mind, and to get that old they have matured relatively slowly and their cellulose fibres are short and very densely packed, which is what makes them 'hard' woods. This is ideal for furniture, wall panelling, real wooden ‘parquet’ floors, old-fashioned policeman’s truncheons, and many other uses where quite often a non-tropical hardwood timber would do just as well, but hey, these tropical forest trees are just there, waiting to be ripped out of the ground or hacked down, anyway.
Add to this, some foreign Governments can be ‘persuaded’ to give you a licence to level a given 5000 hectare patch of forest, even if the country is under the watchful eye of some bothersome NGO's or bunch of tree-hugging hippies. And if no-one is looking, let’s go and cut them down anyway and hope we get away with it.
Those last few sentences were an attempt at irony, because even as someone from the paper industry at large, I have been a conservationist for longer than I have had pulp running through my veins, and conservation and papermaking in the same sentence is not an oxymoron, in fact, the paper industry has been responsible for supporting and expanding much of the valuable work of organisations such as FSC, PEFC and SFI (see footnotes) that identifies the source of the timber so long as it has been ethically ‘farmed’, from a conservation perspective, and NOT ripped from the loving embrace of an Amazonian or Borneo tribesman.
Trees used in papermaking are from the temperate regions of the globe, though there are pine and eucalyptus plantations in South America where once stood tropical rain forest, but it was destroyed for timber, or farming land for cattle rearing (so where did you think your Fray Bentos corned beef came from? Fray Bentos is a place, not just another trade name) or cash crops, all of which failed after a year or two because the soil is basically so poor (think of the roots of the buttress rooted tropical trees that are so near the surface and spread over such a vast area). Then when the rains came and washed away what little soil there was, and areas the size of Wales are de-forested each week, month, or year depending on your information source and miles and miles of once lush forest is turned into muddy, virtually sterile desert.
Then some Sylviculturalists (that’s Tree Scientists to you and me) came along and said “Why don’t we plant trees there that we can use, crop within just ten years or so, replant, and crop again, and so on?” That way the soil gets enriched, we get trees for timber and paper-making, and a degree of habitat restoration is achieved, albeit an environmental monocultural. Plus, for every so many ‘farmed’ trees that have a relatively short cropping cycle, we will also plant ‘X’ many tropical hardwood trees, and even create ‘islands’ of such trees and ‘tree highways’ between them so the wildlife can resettle. And here’s the ‘funny’ part, these tree lovers were not from WWF, Friends of the Earth, or Greenpeace – they were all too busy wringing their hands and weeping bitter tears rather than putting forward recovery and re-forestation plans (witness Malaysia's forest policy pre-2009) -- these ‘radical’ scientists were from timber, pulp and paper companies! It worked too. Aside from the illegal logging that still goes on regardless anywhere that’s hot and wet – dependant on whether the country in question is run by a questionable government, or whether or not the native Indians have shot the loggers first – aside from that, ‘tree farming’, inspected, approved, and labelled by people like FSC, PEFC or SFI, is an environmentally and financially rewarding enterprise in South America, Viet Nam, Tropical Africa, Sri Lanka, the list goes on, largely unnoticed.
In the Far East (Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo et al) the destruction of the rain forest and all the unbearable habitat and environmental problems that it brings, has nothing to do with the pulp and paper industry, although there is a question mark over that word ‘nothing’. Asia has a burgeoning population, a growing economy, and a huge demand for paper products. While most pulp and paper companies from that part of the World do not commission the felling of tropical forest, they do buy the wood from so-called middle-men, and thus they can be said to have ‘sap on their hands’ if not blood. Some pulp companies actually have logging companies as subsidiaries, but you have to be something of a Sherlock Holmes to find out.
In The West we are equally to blame because we continue to buy paper and goods made from paper and board that originates in these places (especially Indonesia, and I'm sorry Mr Shengfu Wu, China). Western book publishers are also to blame because, whereas a few years ago most European book publishers deserted Western Europe for the cheap-labour economies of Eastern Europe. Today if you look inside the cover of way too many books, you will find they are printed in China which of course means on Chinese papers! Even a fantastic book that my belovèd daughter purchased from the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) at VAST expense, listing all the plants and animals that are endangered on this Earth (what used to be called The Red Book, but this was gloriously illustrated on coated paper) was printed in China on non-certified paper! Oh, IUCN, how you missed an opportunity, and have gone so far down in my estimation it is difficult to see you now as the 'authority' you once were! When are the buyers in publishing houses going to wake-up to THEIR responsibilities to the environment. Personally I boycott books printed in the Far East on uncertified paper whenever I can, but when the IUCN miss-a-trick what hope does Joe Public stand of forcing change?
Thinking back to the cattle ranches that replaced the Amazon Rain Forest, look for something called Palm Oil in the ingredients/contents of the products you buy each week at your local supermarket. Much of the areas denuded of tropical (hardwood) rain forest are being replanted with relatively fast growing palm trees, for the sake of the oil that is extracted from the ‘fruit’. Further, with the worry over climate change and the effect that carbon-dioxide plays, there is an international demand for bio-fuels. For bio-fuels read diesel mixed with palm oil. As for electric cars etc. forget it! How is the electricity generated? Fossil fuels largely. How about instead, dropping the pressure on governments to promote bio-fuels and electric cars, and go for Hydrogen Fuel-Cell technology instead!
Today, aside of the local need for fuel or space, or even just an income, most of the tropical ‘illegal’ logging is being carried-out to clear land for Palm Oil plantations. The darned stuff is in whatever you spread on your toast in the mornings, and in the soap you wash your hands with. It’s in shampoo and it’s in bars of chocolate. It is truly a ‘wonder’ ingredient, but for the destruction of forests, and forest dwellers livelihoods, that has to occur to produce it. It is planted as a mono-culture crop, so there are no tropical trees left within a plantation for the displaced wildlife to return to, and even if there were, these Palm Oil plantations are so vast that whatever wildlife managed to eke-out an existence on some miraculously un-cut tree, would be so isolated it could neither thrive or breed. Perhaps just as bad, local hunters and poachers would have a ‘captive’ source for bush meat, and in due course, illegally logged timber as well.
Trees, even in mono-culture commercial forests, absorb carbon-dioxide from the air, turn it into wood, and ‘breathe out’ oxygen. The Amazonian Rainforest was at one time called ‘The Lungs of the World’. Best Practice forestry now looks dimly on mono-culture forests anyway, and expects measures to be taken to ensure a good, proportionate, mix of trees (within a commercial framework) so that there is hope for wildlife to continue to flourish – anything from troops of Howler Monkeys to rare Orchids, exotic butterflies to Birds of Paradise.
A worry is the use of so-called newer bio-fuels. Drax power station in the U.K.–the U.K.'s biggest emitter of CO2, are (2018) shouting loud that, when once they were truly massive users of coal, now they are far more 'green' by converting to the use of bio-feul pellets. My question would be "So how do you obtain your bio-fuel pellets?" The answer would be that they are shipped across the Atlantic on truly huge barges, from manufacturing mills that illegally clear-cut areas of old-growth swamp forest in the southern states of the U.S.A. In short, destroy the ecology, use lots of energy to make the pellets, ship them all the way across the Atlantic on vessels that burn the grossest heavy fuel oil, then burn the pellets in a power station to create electricity. Is that really what we have come to in 'green energy' sourcing?
But let us not lose sight of the fact that the majority of Western pulp (and thereafter, paper) is made from pine, Eucalyptus, Silver Birch, Aspen, and a few others, which are grown in the West, commercially, from Finland to Portugal, and from Russia to Alaska. A great number of these trees are in fact grown for much needed timber, for building, and the pulp industry takes the stragglers, the side branches, those parts of a tree that it would not be economical to turn into floor boards or roof trusses, as well as the waste-wood from the timber mills.
When it comes to recycled paper, for a given value of the word ‘recycled’, there have been huge advances, even in as recently as the turn of the twenty-first century, and now so much of the newsprint is made from genuine recycled waste papers and magazines, that at times there is not enough of it ‘to go round’. Likewise waste cardboard, from cornflakes boxes to corrugated cartons. These are recycled, along with mixed waste paper not suitable for newsprint production, for the production of the brown papers used to make the top and bottom layers of corrugated board, as well as the more straw coloured corrugated ‘fluting’ middles. Again, a lot of the time there just isn’t enough waste to go round, and whose fault is that? The concerned public for not doing their share of recycling, perhaps?
Thus, I hope I have shown that cutting down on paper does not save trees, unless you take into account the trees that were grown especially for that purpose (‘farmed’ trees), and the forests where they grew are re-planted ready for the next crop in ten, twenty, or however many years it takes – foresters take ‘the long view’. Not using paper, though I often wonder what ‘we’ would use instead for most applications, does not save The Planet, quite the reverse, commercial forestry absorbs the demon CO2 and consequently helps save The Planet. Growing trees, that is to say trees that are in the process of growing, absorb two or three times more carbon from the atmosphere than do mature forests. One person has stated that the best thing an individual can do is to build a library (or even a bookshelf) and fill it with books printed on truly responsibly sourced papers. Why? Well, the trees have had a good life and have been very valuable in turning CO2 into oxygen whilst retaining the carbon as paper fibre, and if you keep the book rather than burning it, you, as an individual have 'carbon-locked' that pollutant forever (one hopes).
'Carbon Sequestration’, which has got to be better than the Norwegian idea of somehow capturing carbon from industrial pollution and pumping it into under-sea pockets or caverns. When you go shopping for paper for your home or office inkjet or laser printer, look for the FSC label (or others), or if you insist on using re-cycled paper, that’s fine too, re-cycled office papers have come a long way from those which were not really made from ‘true’ recycled waste, or those grey, limp, full of stray flecks, recycled papers that looked and acted most of the time little better than toilet tissue! Look for the Blue Angel mark, or the FSC Recycled mark. There are excellent qualities on the shelf that you can be proud to put your environmentally conscious name to, your own as an individual, or that of your company if you buy for a business or organisation.
Are you up to your ankles in junk mail and almost any other waste paper? Recycle it! If you have the opportunity, segregate your waste paper, keeping separate quantities of old newspapers and magazines, from junk mail, envelopes with windows, mail-order catalogues, cardboard boxes, cornflakes boxes, etc. etc. The waste paper merchants (or your Local Authority who have quotas to meet) will love your for that little bit of extra effort. For instance, a 'window' envelope will general be removed from the waste-stream and burnt in toto , because that window is probably plastic based and it would be to expensive to employ operatives to tear the window out for the sake of the valuable fibre in the paper. If before you put your window envelopes in the recycling bin, tear them in half, and ditch the window. If you are the Environmental Officer for a Company (or organisation) it is now part of your ‘job spec.’ (or should be) to minimise waste, and to see that any waste is properly recycled so only buy window envelopes that can be recycled – Your Planet Needs You!
As an individual, keep an eye out for those goods that you buy that contain palm oil. You will have a terrific job to avoid them completely, but where there is a similar product available that has less, or better yet, no, Palm Oil in it’s list of ingredients, buy that one instead. If you feel strongly about it (and you should) write to the Managing Director of the company that makes or brands that bar of soap or chocolate and ask them to stop using palm oil and go back to whatever it was they used to use. If they say it would be too expensive, that’s just nonsense, and ask “Too expensive for who?”. The real answer is surely, "Too expensive for The Planet"!
Footnote:
FSC - Forest Stewardship Council:
FSC is an international, non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world's forests. It was founded in 1993 in response to public concern about deforestation and demand for a trustworthy wood-labelling scheme. There are national working groups in 28 countries. It is supported by NGOs including WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Woodland Trust. www.fsc.org
PEFC - Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes:
The PEFC Council is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation, founded in 1999 which promotes sustainably managed forests through independent third party certification. The PEFC provides an assurance mechanism to purchasers of wood and paper products that they are promoting the sustainable management of forests.
PEFC is a global umbrella organisation for the assessment of and mutual recognition of national forest certification schemes developed in a multi-stakeholder process. These national schemes build upon the inter-governmental processes for the promotion of sustainable forest management, a series of on-going mechanisms supported by 149 governments in the world covering 85% of the world's forest area. www.pefc.org
SFI (Sustainable Forest Initiative):
SFI, Inc. is a non-profit organization devoted to improving sustainable forest management in the US and Canada through the Sustainable Forestry Initiative program. The SFI program is now fully independent. On January 1, 2007, a new, fully independent organization, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Inc. (SFI, Inc.) was created to direct all elements of the SFI® program.
This independence solidifies the SFI program’s strong market position as one of the world’s leading forest certification programs.
The multi-stakeholder Board of Directors of SFI, Inc. is the sole governing body over the SFI Standard and all aspects of the program, including chain of custody certification and labelling, marketing and promotion. The diversity of the board members reflects the variety of interests in the forestry community. Board representatives come from environmental and conservation organizations, public officials, professional and academic groups, forest products industry, independent logging professionals and forest landowners. This balance ensures that the SFI Program protects the economic, environmental and social needs of our forests and communities. www.aboutsfi.org
There are many other initiatives aimed at the paper industry, from the EU Eco Label (EU Flower), the Nordic Swan, the German Blue Angel, the British NAPM Recycled Mark, and the European Grade Finders Recycled Content scoring system.