FSC Has Reached 30,000 Chain of Custody Certificates!

Editor’s note: Arbor Day, which falls on April 28 this year, was established in the United States in 1872 as a day to plant and care for trees. To mark the event, Gary M. Scott, chair of the Paper and Bioprocess Engineering Department at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, answers five questions about the pulp and paper industry – a major consumer of trees. 1. Does paper manufacturing contribute to deforestation? Pulp and paper companies often are accused of cutting down trees to make paper. However, 39 percent of the fiber used for papermaking comes from recycled paper. Most of the remaining wood is obtained either through forest thinning (removing slow-growing or defective trees) or from lumber milling residues – materials that otherwise would go unused. Only 36 percent of timber harvested in the United States is used directly to make paper and paperboard. Each year the amount of wood harvested from U.S. forests is much less than annual forest growth. Land covered by forests in the United States increased by 4.5 percent between 1997 and 2012, even as suburban development expanded. click Read More below for more of the story

At the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, nations from around the world finalized a new set of goals and targets to guide global action through 2030 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. The goals include protecting 30 per cent of the world's land, water, and marine areas by 2030, as well as mobilizing at least USD 200 billion per year in domestic and international biodiversity-related funding from both public and private sources. FSC solutions directly contribute to the delivery of the Framework through the following indicators in the monitoring framework: *Target 10: Progress toward sustainable forest management and forest area under forest certification scheme like the Forest Stewardship Council. *Goal B: Certified forests with verified impacts on biodiversity conservation.

UPM has joined the Renewable Carbon Initiative (RCI) which was founded in September 2020 by twelve leading companies in the chemical industry. The aim of the initiative is to support and speed up the transition from fossil carbon to renewable carbon for all organic chemicals and materials. “This is about a fundamental change in the chemical industry. Just as the energy industry is converting to renewable sources, renewable carbon will become the new foundation of chemical and material industries in the future. We want to accelerate the change,” says Michael Carus, CEO of nova-Institute in Germany and the head of the Renewable Carbon Initiative. The Renewable Carbon Initiative addresses the core problem of climate change, which is largely related to extracting and using additional fossil carbon from the ground.