Green Paper

News and updates on issues and trends in the green paper space, covering green paper, eco-friendly paper products, paper companies and green packaging. The links are brought to you in a chronological order. We hope you will find them useful!

You can also check our other resource pages on our green resources page, including: The future of publishing, Green books and FSC vs. SFI.

TD Bank Aims to Go ‘Paper Neutral’, Environmental Leader, December 14, 2011 - TD Bank Group has announced a commitment to become “paper neutral” within its North American operations by the end of 2012. The bank says the paper neutrality goal is two-pronged: first, TD aims to cut its paper use by 20 percent by 2015. Second, it will introduce a forest conservation program to offset the paper it does use.

Yellow Pages: Will the Madness Ever Stop?, Nick Aster, Triple Pundit, December 4, 2011 - This post gets easier to write every year. As I've reported many times in the past, a truckload of yellow pages has been dropped off at my apartment building. This year, there seems to be a new technique – actually putting the individual bags at each apartment's door instead of just dumping them in the foyer.

Reinventing the Role of Paper in the Digital World, Gaia Dempsey, Triple Pundit, November 2, 2011 - But what about paper's environmental footprint? Last week I spoke with Lewis Fix of pulp & paper company Domtar about sustainability and how a paper giant is evolving to meet the needs of the market today. We talked about what motivates him to continue to lead sustainability initiatives in the paper industry.

International Paper announces environmental goals, Melanie Defries, printweek.com, November 1, 2011 - International Paper has announced its plans to cuts its energy usage by 15% and its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020.

Victoria's Secret Pushes Up Green Paper Content in Catalogs, Leslie Guevarra, GreenBiz.com, October 28, 2011 - The Victoria's Secret catalogs are known for stirring up many thoughts, but forest preservation usually isn't the first one that comes to mind. Which is why, according to advocacy group ForestEthics, the firm and its parent company Limited Brands should get a shout-out for pressing ahead with a program to increase the use of green-certified paper products for the catalogs.

Staples, Avery, Others Start Forest Product Working Group, Environmental Leader, October 13, 2011 - Staples, Domtar, Bank of America and Avery Dennison are among the founding members of the Forest Products Working Group, launched by non-profit organization GreenBlue. The group will work to develop practical tools and resources to address issues including climate change, resource efficiency, forest health, and biodiversity.

Staples, Avery, Others Start Forest Product Working Group, Environmental Leader, October 13, 2011 - Staples, Domtar, Bank of America and Avery Dennison are among the founding members of the Forest Products Working Group, launched by non-profit organization GreenBlue. The group will work to develop practical tools and resources to address issues including climate change, resource efficiency, forest health, and biodiversity.

Seven F500 Companies Stop Using SFI Certified Wood, Raz Godelnik, Triple Pundit, September 16, 2011 - Here's a quick green test: What is the eco-label that generates the most controversy? If you answered SFI give yourself an A. Now the controversy around the Sustainable Forestry Initiative certification (SFI) is reaching new levels as seven Fortune 500 companies decided to reject it.

Virgin Media Discusses Closed Loop Internal Paper Program, Environmental Leader, August 31, 2011

Microsoft's Offices Go 100% Recycled Paper, Leon Kaye, greengopost.com, August 20, 2011 - Microsoft announced yesterday that starting this Friday, the company will purchase only 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) paper for its offices in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, including its vast Redmond headquarters. The company's previous printing stock was 30%.

Paper Packaging Produced in Canada Nears 80% Recycled Content, Laura M. Thompson, PhD, Environmental Leader, August 15, 2011 - There are reportedly 30 mills in Canada capable of producing packaging grades – of those mills, almost two thirds produce products with 100% recycled content.  The average has climbed consistently over the past 20 years and has reached a current high of 77%.Big surprise?  Front page, headline news for the Toronto Sun or the Globe and Mail ?  Not really.  More like business as usual. 

Office Depot Will Use Paper Bags To Save Trees, Beth Buczynski, Care 2, August 7, 2011 - By offering its delivery customers the option of receiving their order in paper bags, rather than cardboard boxes, Office Depot hopes to eliminate millions of pounds of paper waste. During pilot testing of the GreenerOffice Delivery Service program, Office Depot found that a whopping 90 percent of eligible customers voluntarily opted into the program.

International Paper Reduces Energy Use By 7%, Gina-Marie Cheeseman, Triple Pundit, July 22, 2011 - International Paper (IP) reduced its total energy use from 2007 to 2010 by almost seven percent, equivalent to the amount of power needed for 420,000 homes, or removing one million passenger vehicles from the road, according to the paper and packaging company's 2010 Sustainability Report. IP also reduced its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by over 30 percent from 2000 to 2009.

New Leaf and Office Depot Talk Recycled Paper and Radical Transparency, The Paper Planet, June 2, 2011 - At the Greenbiz.com, State of Green Business Forum, 2011, New Leaf Paper and Office Depot presented their "One Great Idea" in which they used cutting-edge web technology to tell the story of 100% recycled copy paper and the surprising make-up of its carbon footprint. Their approach exemplifies a new direction in customer engagement around sustainability and provides a visually powerful representation of complex environmental data.

Paper Calculator Relaunched in Time for Earth Day Focus on Green Choices, The Paper Planet, April 20, 2011 - Today, version 3.0 of the Paper Calculator was launched and ownership and management was transferred to the Environmental Paper Network (EPN) from its original developer and host, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The Paper Calculator is the most trusted, independent tool available to paper purchasers to measure and report the environmental benefits and savings of choosing environmentally superior paper.

Forestry Trade Group Raises Bar for Paper Recycling Goals, Matthew Wheeland, GreenBiz.com, April 4, 2011 - Paper recovery and recycling is one of the few areas of green business practices that show steady, continual improvement, as we have found every year for the last four years in our State of Green Business report: Since 1990, the amount of the paper supply recovered for recycling has nearly doubled, reaching 63.5 percent this year.

Allstate, Office Depot, Five Others to Drop Sustainable Forestry Label, Environmental Leader, March 29, 2011 - Aetna, Allstate and five other companies have made commitments to stop using the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) eco-label, a non-profit has announced. ForestEthics said that Garnet Hill, Performance Bicycles, Symantec and United Stationers have all taken actions to drop the label, joining Office Depot, whose phase-out ForestEthics announced last fall.

Daintree Paper Discusses Sustainability Efforts, Environmental Leader, March 21, 2011

McDonald's Adopts Industry Leading Forest Standards for Its Packaging, Dogwood Alliance, March 18, 2011 - While McDonald’s sustainable packaging policies have incorporated the familiar and important tenets of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, it’s the adoption of new forest standards discouraging the conversion of natural forests to industrial tree plantations and giving buying preference for paper products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that propels McDonald’s ahead of its competitors and sets a higher environmental bar for the fast food industry.

Chicago, Berkeley Aim to Wipe Out Junk Mail, Cut Landfill Waste, GreenBiz.com, March 8, 2011 - Five U.S. cities rolled out programs targeting unwanted junk mail today to trim landfill waste and related disposal costs. Chicago, Berkeley, Calif., Ithaca, N.Y., Kansas City and Salem, Ore., introduced a Mail Preference Service Tuesday, allowing residents to put an end to unsolicited junk mail, such as credit offers, phone books and advertisements.

Staples Launches Rainforest Alliance Paper, Environmental Leader, March 4, 2011 - Staples is launching its first brand of paper certified by the Rainforest Alliance. The line of paper, Domtar EarthChoice Office Paper by Staples, will be manufactured by Domtar Corporation. It will be sold to Staples Advantage and Staples.com customers in the U.S.

Applying Radical Transparency to Your Paper's Carbon Trail, Ellyn Fortino, Greenbiz.com, February 15, 2011 - New Leaf Paper and Office Depot will soon take consumers on a virtual carbon trail of New Leaf's 100 percent recycled paper in hopes of encouraging them to think and act sustainably.

Are pulp & paper industry consultants distracting the public?, Aaron Sanger, The Paper Planet, February 7, 2011 - At the end of last year, pulp and paper industry consultant Phil Riebel wrote a blog post for RISI posing the provocative question “Are environmental campaigns misleading the public?” Riebel's main point is that paper products should be evaluated across their entire life cycles, and not on only one environmental impact point such as fiber content. ForestEthics couldn't agree more: paper products should be assessed across their entire life cycle and environmental impacts should be minimized at each stage of the cycle.

Yellow Pages Faces Another Ban, Environmental Leader, February 2, 2011 - Two cities are pursuing legislation to ban or restrict distribution of the Yellow Pages, as the directory publishers themselves launch a website to help customers opt out of deliveries. In San Francisco, Board of Supervisors president David Chu is leading the push to ban the books, which he says are wasteful and becoming obsolete.

The State of Green Business 2011 - good news when it comes to paper intensity and recycling, Eco-Libris blog , February 1, 2011 - The report, as Joel Makower chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group is writing today, includes mixed news, both good and bad developments in the green markets. Paper fortunately is one on the good side, presenting positive progress on two major fronts - paper intensity and recycling.

WWF launches database of eco-rated paper products, WWF , January 31, 2011 - WWF today launched a global benchmarking tool for pulp and paper products at PaperWorld in Frankfurt, Germany. Check Your Paper is an online database to help paper buyers find products with the lowest environmental impact. The tool rates the environmental quality of the paper-making process for a given product, including how well forests supplying fibre are managed, use of recycled fibre, fossil CO2 emissions, waste going to landfills and water pollution from mills.

Q&A: Fiber Testing, Paper, and the Lacey Act, Ruth Nogueron, Craig Hanson and Adam Grant, World Resources Institute, Jnauary 26, 2011 - In November 2010, WRI posted “Risk Free? Paper and the Lacey Act” in which we discussed using paper fiber testing to find potentially illegally harvested wood in paper products purchased in the United States. The article received a lot of interest from companies in the forest product supply chain and from civil society organizations working to reduce illegal logging. Here, we respond to some frequently asked questions about fiber testing and how one might use the technology to manage risk in the paper supply chain.

Becoming a Top Green Printer the Hemlock Way, Gail Nickel-Kailing, Printing Impressions, Jnauary 26, 2011 - An interview with Dick Kouwenhoven, president and CEO of Hemlock Printers (Burnaby, British Columbia), who set an audacious goal - to become the “greenest printer in the world” and did it! In 2009, the company received the “International 2008 Heidelberg Eco Printing Award for Most Sustainable Printing Company!” And, in 2010, Hemlock was named the “Most Environmentally Progressive Printer in Canada” for the fifth consecutive year.

Cool Runnings: New Leaf: Where Sustainability Meets Profitability, Business on Main Videos, Jnauary 2011 - Cool Runnings profiles a company whose commitment to creating sustainable paper is transforming an entire industry.

 

Metafore Further Meshes EPAT Paper-Buying Tool with Green Efforts, Matthew Wheeland, GreenBiz.com, Jnauary 13, 2011 - One sign that this trend will be continuing for the foreseeable future is the latest update to the Environmental Paper Assessment Tool (EPAT), as well as changes planned for the near future by Metafore, a program of GreenBlue. EPAT 2.1 was released this week, bringing an even deeper level of data about the environmental impacts of paper production to companies that rely on forest products as their lifeblood - publishing firms, banks and even coffee companies, among others.

Initiatives to Reduce Paper Use, Improve the Bottom Line, Ralph Reid, Environmental Leader, January 11, 2011 - While many organizations focus on big picture environmental opportunities such as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and increasing renewable energy investments, sometimes the most elemental facets of business get overlooked. One of the most basics of business is paper, used in everything from billing to photo-copying, marketing and reporting.

Huge Win for Southern U.S. Forests (& the World), Zachary Shahan, Reuters, January 3, 2011 - 90 million acres of Southern hardwood forests, along with 600,000 acres in 11 endangered forests and special areas in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Eco-Region, recently got a big boost in protection. Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific (GP) has announced that "it will no longer purchase trees from endangered forests and special areas, or from new pine plantations established at the expense of natural hardwood forests."

Greenpeace: Sears, Best Buy, Other Big Brands ‘Failing Our Forests’, Environmental Leader , December 16, 2010 - Sears, Best Buy, Toys R US, Home Depot, and Harlequin are “failing our forests” according to the “2010 Boreal Marketplace” annual report from Greenpeace. The study evaluates 23 major forest-products customers on their concrete actions to protect the Boreal Forest and the woodland caribou. “True leaders” were determined to be Axel Springer, Cascades, Indigo Books, Kimberly-Clark, Office Depot and Rona.

Risk Free? Paper and the Lacey Act, Ruth Nogueron and Craig Hanson, World Resources Institute, November 15, 2010 - The amended U.S. Lacey Act has already impacted the wood industry, from the investigation of Gibson Guitars to a recently-reported seizure of Peruvian hardwood. Both of these cases involved solid wood products. But what about paper? Paper poses the challenge of linking an illegally harvested tree in a faraway forest to a piece of paper purchased in the United States - after all the mixing and bleaching.

 

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