Industrial plantation paper is not always sustainable
Natural forest fibre sourced through appropriate harvesting delivers better outcomes for the environment and the printing industry – Industry Edge report.
Sourcing paper by relying on paper companies’ chain-of-custody and certification of industrial plantations is not promoting true sustainable outcomes. The bad impacts of industrial eucalyptus plantations, especially in countries such as Uruguay, Thailand and Indonesia, can be far more damaging than the outcomes from sustainable harvesting of natural forests.
A new report, Plantation Forest – The Sustainable Paper Perspective, details a litany of disadvantages from plantation and industrial forestry including the dispossession of people who are excluded from their once natural forests, destruction of the eco-system and the alienation of food producing land in a continuing battle of ‘food versus fibre.’
The authors, industry analysts and commentators, Industry Edge, note that Australian paper buyers and consumers are unaware of the anti-social and environmental impacts of industrial plantations. They maintain that when paper buyers ask – is this product from an industrial plantation and not from a natural forest? – they are asking the wrong question.
The report questions whether it is sound to equate ethical, sustainable paper sources with industrial plantations. Over time, we have grown concerned at the characterization of imported paper sourced from industrial plantations as automatically and seemingly unquestionably sustainable, and we remain concerned that this is regularly, inappropriately and often incorrectly contrasted with paper sourced from sustainably managed natural forests.
The report resonates with the local experience where much of Australian Paper’s pulp is sourced not from plantations but from native forests.
The vexed question of natural forest versus plantations has grown to the stage internationally that Thailand’s Advanced Agro, a major supplier to Australia of a range of office papers under the AA brand, denies it has any industrial plantations. According to the report, its claims border on green washing and ignore the company’s prosecutions for illegal logging and land clearing. It maintains that despite the denials Advanced Agro is the largest single industrial plantation owner in Thailand.
Plantation Forest – The Sustainable Paper Perspective, is a companion publication to the recently released Sustainable Paper Procurement Guide and the Cut Reams Report, both from Industry Edge. According to director, Tim Woods, it is in response to a near Orwellian assumption that ‘plantations are good, native forests are bad,’ which he describes as a bizarre domestic fixation. The report attempts to back up his claim that, especially in developing countries, plantations are often the problem and rarely the solution.
Copies of the report may be had from www.industryedge.com.au