Seville, Spain (8 September 2014) – “We are proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last 20 years. We have come a long way, but we can achieve even more. And the World’s forests need that.”

This statement was made by Kim Carstensen, Director General of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) ahead of the organization’s official celebration of its 20th anniversary, at its triennial General Assembly in Seville, Spain.

FSC was founded in 1994 after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro failed to address the challenge of deforestation. Since the Rio Summit, the world has lost seven percent of its forest cover. While some countries in temperate regions have seen deforestation rates stabilize, or even reverse, loss of forest cover remains a significant challenge, especially in tropical regions where FSC’s influence remains limited.

“There are many tools needed to prevent deforestation in tropical forest countries. One of these tools is certification,” Carstensen explained. “We currently have 20 million hectares certified in tropical timber countries, and about 10% of the total FSC certified forest is in the tropics. This is not nearly enough. But we do know that those 20 million hectares are being managed in such a way that is environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable. We need to work to increase that 20 million hectares substantially.”

The reasons for this deforestation had little to do with the forests themselves. Tropical deforestation was mainly caused by conversion of forest for palm oil cultivation, beef grazing, soya production, and all manner of other agricultural activities. Weaker governance and often conflict in many tropical forest countries was also responsible for deforestation. Plantation establishment played a role in some settings, but FSC was seeing promising developments towards more sustainable approaches, particularly where certification played a role.

After 20 years in existence, FSC is the world’s strongest certification, in terms of global reach, robustness of certification criteria and number of businesses involved in the system. Over 180 million hectares are FSC certified. The organisation works with 150,000 small holders around the world, and is increasingly working with indigenous groups who live in and around certified forests. Recently, FSC formed the Permanent Indigenous Peoples’ Committee to ensure that indigenous people have a say in the way forests are managed.

The General Assembly is FSC’s top decision-making body, where the members propose, debate and vote on policy that guides the organization. As a member-led democracy, FSC is unique among forest certification systems.

About The Forest Stewardship Council

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an independent non-governmental organization that promotes environmentally sound, socially beneficial, and economically prosperous management of the world’s forests. FSC was created in 1993 to help consumers and businesses identify products from well-managed forests. FSC sets standards by which forests are certified, offering credible verification to people who are buying wood and wood products. Currently more than 175 million hectares and 25,000 companies are certified to FSC standards world-wide. For more information visit ic.fsc.org/.

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Forest certification is a voluntary, market-focused mechanism, which supports a broad range of social, economic and environmental benefits associated with sustainable forest management. It is of concern that, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), only 10% of the world’s forests are independently certified.

Led by 26 global companies along the forest products value chain responsible for nearly 40% of annual global forest, paper and packaging sales, the WBCSD Forest Solutions Group seeks to ensure that the supply of independently-verified sustainable wood and other forest products continues to increase to meet growing demand. To achieve this objective, all WBCSD companies involved in the Forest Solutions Group commit to:

• Work with stakeholders to spread sustainable forest management;
• Support and promote the expansion of forest certification;
• Set 2020 targets to increase the use of certification when sourcing forest products and fiber; and
• Grow markets for certified forest products.

The WBCSD also calls on all forest certification stakeholders to actively:

• Promote certification to forest owners and companies around the world to improve forest management practices with a priority focus on tropical forests;
• Fully utilize existing certification within their own programs, operations, supply chains, and investments; and
• Support approaches to sustainable development that include small forest owners, community forestry, indigenous peoples and agroforestry operators via forest certification and other tools.

We ask other stakeholders, including all WBCSD member companies that support the objectives of this statement, to lend their endorsement by contacting James Griffiths, Managing Director at the WBCSD (griffiths@wbcsd.org) to explore active collaboration. 

The post Leadership Statement on the Value and Future of Forest Certification first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).

Press release from the issuing company

“Toshiba may have meant well when it attempted to publicize its ‘print leaner and greener’ initiative with a ‘National No-Print Day’ campaign, but it was well off base when it pointed a finger at print as an anti-tree medium,” said National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph P. Truncale, Ph.D. “Despite this all-too-often repeated anti-print “save a tree” refrain, print and paper are simply not enemies of the environment.

“Reading a book on a tablet may be convenient, but it is not more environmentally friendly than reading a printed copy,” he continued. “Paying a bill online may be quicker, but it is not better for the woodlands than paying it by check. Why? Because paper is a renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable resource, while computers and other electronic devices are comprised primarily of one-time-use only metals and hydrocarbon-based materials, and they require energy created principally through the use of other non-renewable resources.”

NAPL has long pointed out that paper production uses trees, but it does not destroy forests. Paper companies depend on trees for their business, so they plant more trees than they harvest each year, carefully managing forests on privately owned lands for maximum tree growth and production.

In fact, despite the billions of sheets of paper that have been produced, the United States has about 12 million more acres of forest land now than it did a quarter of a century ago, and overall forest inventory has increased 49% over the last half-century. Every day, more than 1.7 million trees are planted in the U.S., nearly half of them (45%) by the forest products industry. You might say that every printed page helps plant a tree. By comparison, according to Time magazine, more than 130,000 computers are discarded by Americans every day.

The problem at landfills is not paper, which is recycled at very high levels, providing many towns and cities with an important income source. The real waste problem is the rapidly escalating number of discarded computers and other electronic components, which are not biodegradable and will sit in landfills for generations, taking up increasing amounts of space and ultimately leaching lead, mercury, and other toxic metals, hazardous chemicals, and plastic residue into the soil. Electronics now make up the fastest-growing part of the U.S. waste stream.

Everyone in the printing industry has the same interest as Toshiba in making our processes as environmentally friendly as possible, and we have all been working toward that goal for decades. Witness, for example, the growth of forest-certification and chain-of-custody programs, the new technologies that increase the paper yield per trees—in some cases, 90,000 sheets from a single cord of wood, and the use of renewable biomass fuels to power paper manufacturing—since 1990, purchased energy and fossil fuel use per ton of paper production has been cut by 26%.

As NAPL stated in an article two years ago, “The environmental impact of any communications process generally occurs at one or more of three stages: the creation of the medium being used for the message, the transmission of the message, and the conclusion or aftermath of the process. At each point, paper-based communications have a less injurious environmental effect than their electronic counterpart. Print and electronic media will coexist in the future and complement each other’s strengths. And one of paper‘s undeniable strengths is its position as an environmentally friendly messaging medium.”

Whatever Toshiba’s well-intentioned environmental goals may be,” said Truncale, “it is simply short-sighted and wrong-headed to suggest that the environment is harmed by the use of paper and printing.”

In Brief:

• Paper is a renewable resource, grown and replenished in managed forests; the precious metals and hydrocarbons required to create computers and other electronic devices are not—they require mining and drilling that can damage the surrounding ecosystem, and when they have been removed from the earth, they are gone forever.
• Paper is recyclable—nearly two-thirds of U.S. paper consumed is now recovered—and much is reused, more than one-third of the world’s total fiber supply now coming from recycled paper; computer components are used once—often after just a few years of rapid obsolescence—and then this toxic e-waste is discarded in landfills or shipped to developing countries.
• Paper requires only sunlight or the power of a single light bulb to be read and used; computers require a continuous stream of electricity generated predominantly by non-renewable fossil fuel energy sources. In 2006, for example, Internet data servers alone purchased twice the amount of energy purchased by the U.S. pulp and paper industry.

The post NAPL: Toshiba ‘No-Print Day’ Campaign Points Wrongful Finger at Print first appeared on The Paper Story (PAMSA).