China’s paper hunger threatens forests

Archiv – Approximately 60% of the fibre used to make paper and paperboard in China comes from recovered sources, according to a report by US-based Forest Trends entitled ’Environmental Aspects of China’s Papermaking Fiber Supply’.China | Approximately 60% of the fibre used to make paper and paperboard in China comes from recovered sources, according to a report by US-based Forest Trends entitled ’Environmental Aspects of China’s Papermaking Fiber Supply’.
The document points out that, over the past ten years, China’s recovered fibre imports have increased by more than 500% – from 3.1 million tonnes in 1996 to 19.6 million last year. Chinese purchases of US material accounted for 8.6 million tonnes of the 2006 total, making recovered paper one of the top exported commodities from the USA to China by volume.
As the world’s largest consumer of recovered paper by far, China has prevented 65 million tonnes of recovered paper from heading to landfills in the USA, Japan and Europe in the last four years alone, according to Forest Trends. But even this sharp increase in imports is insufficient to keep pace with Chinese demand, the document notes.
With China’s producers scrambling to meet growing domestic and international demand for paper products, especially for higher-quality papers, they are continuing to ’source substantial amounts of wood and wood pulp from countries where good forest management cannot be assured’, says Brian Stafford, lead author of the report and an expert on the international pulp and paper industry.
’It’s clear that the sheer volume of the recovered paper used in Chinese manufacturing has a very beneficial and stabilising effect on the global market for recovered paper, which in turn makes paper collection a viable ’green’ option for communities in wealthy countries,’ comments Kerstin Canby, Director of Forest Finance and Trade at Forest Trends. ’But we remain concerned that Chinese paper companies can’t survive on recovered paper alone, and when they look for other types of fibre – predominantly fibre needed for export-quality paper – some large firms have a tendency to go shopping for wood and pulp in countries where natural forests already are under tremendous pressure.’
The report recommends that Chinese paper companies should adopt systems – such as those established by the non-profit Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Tropical Forest Trust – that would enable the tracking of pulp and pulpwood along the supply chain in order to verify it comes from legal and sustainable forests. In Western Russia, for example, two logging companies have worked with four of the world’s largest consumers of paper products – publishers Axel Spring, Time UK and Random House, and packaging manufacturer Tetra Pak – to create a transparent supply chain of wood fibre derived from legal and sustainable forests.
The report also calls on government or ’public’ buyers of paper to police their supply chains for illegal wood as a way of encouraging other major importers to do the same. The report observes that the EU and Japan have already gone down this route for several wood product categories and that China could start with a pilot procurement programme that ensures paper supplies relating to the 2008 Beijing Olympics are manufactured using raw materials derived from verifiably legal and sustainable sources.