NZ’s positive spin on paper perceptions

The New Zealand Paper Forum (NZPF) release industry facts in its Paper Story campaign to promote the Paper Stewardship Scheme.

Promoting paper as a renewable and responsible choice, the Paper Story highlights paper’s environmental credentials and sets out what businesses and consumers can do to help recover and reuse even more paper that is otherwise thrown away

PrintNZ CEO Joan Grace says the promotional publication share the facts, as there are a number of misconceptions about the environmental impact of paper.

The Scheme has set a target to recover at least 65 percent of all paper products in New Zealand, as consumers reuse a large proportion of the remaining 35 percent.

Grace says the independent work is underway to reach this target. The other two target projects set to be completed this year are about developing a best practice guide and an education strategy for the Forum members.

All NZPF members are signatories to the voluntary scheme, including major manufacturers and distributors of paper products, print companies and associated groups.

According to Joan Grace, the members of the Forum who were part of the former Packaging Accord know the benefits of having good benchmarked data about paper recovery that they can share with their customers. The Paper Stewardship takes this benefit wider to all companies involved from “cradle to grave” with paper.

The three key goals set for the paper stewardship scheme are:

• to ensure the industry recovers at least 65% of all paper manufactured, imported and sold each year. We will encourage organisations and consumers to put paper in their recycling bins including keeping it separate from general household waste, when not reusing it within their own business or household.

• to source wood and wood fibre from well-managed forests.

• to promote paper as an environ-mentally desirable commodity – to show you what paper’s actual impact on the environment is vis-à-vis substitute products such as electronic communications.

According to Paper Story, in the past 20 years the NZ print industry has reduced the use of mineral inks by using vegetable inks, reduced waste by allowing remote digital proofing, and reduced the usage of solvents by using water-based systems.

It has also reduced the risk of dioxins by moving away from elemental chlorine bleaching, and developed computer to plate (CTP) technology, which in most cases removes the need for film thus eliminating chemicals used as developers