Thursday 6 December 2007

The guide, unveiled at the Confederation of European Paper Industries event, includes a scorecard which enables buyers to evaluate the environmental performance of current and future suppliers on recycling, responsible forest management, pollution and climate change. It covers packaging paper to office paper and tissues and provides recommendations on how to work with suppliers towards improvements.

Beatrix Richards, Head of Forests at WWF, said: "This new guide makes it easy for any organization to understand the most important environmental impacts of paper-making and to source responsibly-produced paper products, thus reducing their environmental footprint."

The world's paper consumption has quadrupled in the last 40 years and is growing further. This tremendous expansion threatens the last remaining natural forests, their plant and wildlife, and the people who depend on them in many regions around the world. The processing of pulp and paper also releases vast amounts of greenhouse gases and a wide range of polluting compounds into the environment.

"Paper buyers and producers need to take responsibility for their activities," said Duncan Pollard, WWF International's Conservation Practice and Policy Director. "WWF will now intensify the work with organizations buying large amounts of paper to implement the recommendations outlined in the new guide. It is important that paper buyers influence their suppliers to minimize their environmental impacts on biodiversity loss, climate change and water and air pollution."

The need for a buyers' guide to responsible paper purchasing and use emerged from a WWF 'think tank' with the major paper buyers Canon, IKEA, Lafarge, McDonald's and Unilever. Other buyers have also expressed interest in the new WWF tools.

"We welcome these new WWF initiatives in enhancing the environmental performance of the paper industry," said Bob Latham from the Paper Merchant Robert Horne. "They help to improve transparency and data access. It is vital that paper producers and suppliers provide sufficient and verifiable information to buyers so that they can make informed choices. The WWF Paper Guide can certainly help here."

"Tetra Pak sees the WWF Guide for Buying Paper as an important tool for understanding the environmental performance of the forest and paper industries," said Lena Dahl, Forest Policy Officer at Tetra Pak International. "The Scorecard in the guide provides comparable data for buyers and decision-makers. Tetra Pak has been assessing its global paper board suppliers' performance for a number of years, evaluating nearly the same parameters. We are now investigating whether we can take some lessons from the WWF Paper Scorecard and incorporate these into our supplier evaluation."

"The Scorecard captures a selection of important environmental parameters and presents them in a way that is easy to understand. SCA Forest Products has applied the scoring system on its products and will make the results available to its customers," said Björn Lyngfelt, Vice President Communications, SCA Forest Products. "As for all market instruments, at the end of the day it is the paper customers that will decide the usefulness of the Scorecard."

WWF will credit transparency and responsibility of paper buyers and producers by offering its new Paper Toolbox as a web-based 'meeting place' and resource centre on environmental issues.