Confederation Of Paper Industries Joins Two Sides To Promote Sustainable Paper-Based Industries

The 22nd PEFC General Assembly closed with voices from the future, as countries actively developing national forest certification systems took to the floor. As has become the tradition during our General Assembly, representatives from countries that have or are not yet PEFC members were invited to speak. This year Croatia, Kenya, Myanmar, Philippines and Vietnam all seized the opportunity to share their views. “We are in the process of developing and formulating forest certification in the Philippines,” said Dr. Priscila Dolom, University of the Philippines. “We started in 2014 and have since formed our interim national governing body.” “A technical working group has crafted a forest certification standard and we’re working on a chain of custody standard based on PEFC requirements.” Click Read More below for additional information.

In order to gain more insight into these three vital areas, three Task Forces have been created to analyze the specific challenges in detail, and feed their findings and recommendations back into the working draft of the standard. Each Task Force is made up of members from Working Group 1– the group responsible for the revision of the sustainable forest management standard, alongside additional experts to support the work. All three groups met for the first time in June and will provide preliminary concepts and ideas to the WG in October.

The UK’s papermaking industry has smashed its energy-saving targets for the two-year period from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2016. All 45 of the UK’s paper mills take part in the voluntary Climate Change Agreement (CCA) scheme, launched in 2001, which gifts mills partial relief from the Climate Change Levy (CCL) tax in response for them delivering proven energy efficiency improvements. The paper sector was one of the first to agree to the CCA and by 2006 all mills had signed up. For the two-year period in question, the sector’s agreed target was to deliver a 7.1% improvement on 2008’s figure, and it actually improved by just shy of 10% (9.7%). Performance is defined in terms of a specific set of energy efficiency measurements mostly related to the use of electricity. Click Read More below for more of the story.