Earth Day is April 22, 2019, and to celebrate, we are sharing some environmental highlights from our businesses. Air, land, and water are areas where the JDI team works every day to reduce our environmental footprint. Below are some of the efforts and results:
Since 1990, our Pulp and Paper operations have reduced their carbon footprint by 55%. This puts us amongst top performers in North America and exceeds the target set by the Government of Canada and the Paris Climate Change Accord.
Today renewable green energy sources account for 59% of the fuel used at our pulp, paper, and tissue mills as well as our sawmills.
A recent $30 million investment at Lake Utopia Paper near St. George, N.B. earned the team the 2019 Industry Excellence Award from Natural Resources magazine. Natural Resources magazine’s 2019 Industry Excellence Award in Environmental Stewardship. The new environmental treatment facility turns organic waste into clean-burning biogas. This green energy replaces the use of fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25%. Check out the video here:
This year we will plant over 16 million trees – Nature’s air filters. Over the next 50 years growing trees on the lands we manage will absorb over 92 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s equal to 350,000 cars off the road each year for the next 50 years.
NBM Railways have achieved a 31.4% improvement in fuel efficiency (2015-2018) – reducing fossil fuel consumption by over 13 million liters.
‘Chichibu Mayu’ means ‘cocoon-shaped marshmallow’ in Japanese and is the name of the world’s first forest-born sweets to achieve SGEC/PEFC certification. The forest sweets are made from the sap of maple trees grown in the SGEC/PEFC-certified municipal forests of Chichibu in Saitama, Japan. The forest-born sweets are produced by Chichibu Nakamuraya, a company that has been operating in Chichibu since 1924, and were put on the market this June by Mori for Forest Certification Inc. (MFC). The packaging of the sweets carries both the MFC and SGEC/PEFC labels.
A household carbon footprint refers to the overall amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by all the energy and materials consumed by those who live in a home as they go about their daily lives. It is a common measure of the contribution of a single household to climate change. Understanding your carbon footprint can show opportunities for decreasing your consumption of energy and materials, and in turn, reducing your production of carbon emissions.
By far the largest source of human-induced carbon emissions, is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline, diesel and natural gas. In GHG inventory and carbon footprint studies, the use of fossil fuels is usually the cause of elevated GHG emissions.
Carbon sequestration efforts can help address climate change. Among the efforts championed by scientists and politicians, trees could be among the most significant. With more than a century of experience and expertise in sustainable forestry, we see the many environmental benefits of trees and responsibly managed forests. Our work with forest certification organizations and landowners has contributed to keeping the forests near our pulp and paper mills healthy and profitable. We source wood responsibly, with 41 percent of our wood deliveries in 2020 coming from third-party certified forests, and we are committed to keeping forests as forests by planting more trees to replace those that are used to produce paper and wood pulp.