Having been involved with the paper industry for the last 17 years, I have witnessed many changing
environmental paper trends. Every few years something new emerges in the industry that is considered environmentally trendy at the time. First it was the “post-consumer waste” content or PCW recycled content by which the greenness of a paper was measured. The next wave of excitement came with the term “tree-free,” meaning that the paper is made from alternative fiber sources like industrial hemp, kenaf, bagasse or a variety of other plant-based fibers other than trees. Currently, the dominant environmental indicator is “FSC certified” paper. FSC is the acronym for the Forest Stewardship Council and is the subject of our discussion here.
The Forest Stewardship Council is an independent certification agency established to insure that their approved products come from sustainably managed forests. They certify wood products as well as paper and are supported by the organization Rainforest Alliance.
This all sounds well and good until we recall that the original objective for environmental papers was not just to make papers that saved energy, water and trees but also to utilize commercial and household paper waste as the feedstock for the new product. This is called recycling. The beauty is that we are transforming waste paper into new, recycled usable products, rather than “disposing” at a heavy price to the planet. Whereas, the FSC viewpoint is that we should continue to make paper from trees and that recycling and landfills are not that big of an issue. We disagree!
The paper industry, like a lot of the extracting industries (i.e., coal, oil, etc.,) does not like to change. Changing the way they do things means spending money and they don’t like to do that. It’s easier and preferable for them to continue to make paper from trees instead of building new recycling infrastructure, or developing new pulping technologies utilizing alternative fiber sources.
With FSC, they can pay a nominal fee for the use of the FSC certification and continue to not change very much to appear green. Mills, printing houses, paper distributors all proudly display their FSC emblems to the public but unfortunately the recycled content of their products are often low or non-existent. One can say, without being extremist, that much of this activity is a clear case of corporate greenwashing.
Since global warming is the gravest circumstance for our planet’s future, and that world-wide deforestation is responsible for one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, it stands to reason that one of our greatest responsibilities is to preserve the existing trees and forests as much as we can. For wood products that must come from trees, the FSC certification makes a whole lot of sense. But for paper and paper products, recycling, along with paper conservation, is clearly the better answer.
Qualities determining real environmentally-friendly paper may be considered in this order:
- Post-consumer waste recycled content (PCW). Try for 100%.
- Processed without chlorine or Processed Chlorine Free® (PCF)
- Alternative fiber sources or Tree-Free
- FSC certified recycled
- FSC certified
Steve Baker is a writer of this article. The article “Recycle Paper:Are FSC papers really that green” defines the need of recycled paper product in society and effect of recycled product in environment. Greenlinepaper.com focused on global issue of Global Warming.
