Despite the valiant efforts of paper mills and merchants, there remains a great deal of misunderstanding and misinformation surrounding the industry's green credentials as the survey on page 4 of this supplement underlines. One area in particular that continues to confuse buyers and consumers is the production of recycled paper.

There are a number of myths surrounding recycled paper, such as manufacturing it is more damaging to the environment than making paper from virgin pulp, or fibres can be recycled indefinitely. Unfortunately, efforts to dispel these myths have so far failed to filter into the public consciousness.

So, just how much of a threat is the European paper and pulp industry to the environment, what's the truth about recycled grades and how much more can the industry - and indeed buyers and consumers - be doing to reduce the impact of the life-cycle of paper?

First off the bat, it's important to underline that the European paper and pulp industry has made enormous efforts to green up its act over the last couple of decades.

Ross Bradshaw's experience is typical of any number of paper industry members. "In the mid-1980s someone said to me ‘It's you, the paper makers. You're the ones destroying all the forests'," explains Bradshaw, who is UK director for the sustainable forestry certification standard PEFC. "When somebody says that to you can either stick your head in the sand or do some checking. As a result, since the mid-1980s I'm proud to say that I've been quite a committed environmentalist and a papermaker."

While some people - environmental NGOs, for instance - might argue that this juxtaposition of roles is contradictory, Bradshaw unequivocally defends this statement.

"As an industry we actually do a lot of good in terms of the environment. We plant trees, grow them, harvest them and grow more trees. It's a pretty sustainable operation."

Convincing arguments
Indeed few industry's could argue that their own business model is more sustainable than that of the papermakers'. Yet still there are lingering concerns about the negative impact the sector has on the environment. Bradshaw thinks that this is primarily down to the absence of a coherent, industry-wide communications strategy.

"We have lots of exciting statistics in the paper industry but we fail to communicate them," he says.

These statistics include such nuggets as forest cover in Europe is actually increasing a rate of 7% per year thanks to sustainable forestry and that these forests absorb carbon dioxide and help to counter the Greenhouse Effect (for more stats see Two Sides box, p18). This inability to spread the good word is why Bradshaw welcomed the launch of the Two Sides initiative last year. Two Sides' goal is to "promote the responsible production and use of print and paper, and dispel common environmental misconceptions by providing users with verifiable data on why print and paper is an attractive, practical and sustainable communications medium".

A healthy proportion of Two Sides' time will be occupied in combating some of the myths about the lifecycle of paper and in particular about how recycling works. While Bradshaw concedes that the newspaper industry has done a good job of communicating the message about recycled newsprint, more can be done to bridge the knowledge gap in other areas of the paper debate. For instance, why virgin fibre is important to the recycling process.

"You can take business communications papers and recycle that into something else and then you can drop that down into packaging and then you can drop that down into plasterboard for building. However, you can't do it indefinitely," explains Bradshaw.

A sustainable paper cycle can only exist with a consistent input of virgin fibre from sustainably managed forests, according to John Sanderson director of global environmental market support at UPM-Kymmene (UK).

"The use of recycled fibre in itself is not in fact sustainable since wood fibre breaks down with each cycle of reuse," explains Sanderson. "Wood fibres in paper can typically be recycled five to six times before they become too weak and degraded for further use in papermaking. The paper cycle is potentially sustainable because, and only because, of the continual input of virgin fibre into the overall mix. If virgin fibre were not used at all then with each cycle more and more fibre would be degraded and lost and within as little as six months the world would simply run out of fibre of sufficient quality with which to manufacture paper."

While specifying paper with a high recycled content may tick a number of environmental boxes, there are other measures that, irregardless of whether or not they go down the recycled grades route, can achieve major savings.

For instance, cutting the base weight of the paper used from 80g to 60g could result in as much as a 25% decrease in freight tonnage and distribution emissions. Specifying smarter can also reduce waste, according to Jonathan Tame, environmental manager at Howard Smith Paper Group.

"Prior to paper selection and so often overlooked is the planning of work to ensure best utilisation of paper sizes and thereby using less in the process."

To address this problem, the company offers a bespoke service called MySize for orders in excess of two tonnes. The paper is cut from reels rather than supplied as stock sheets which allows for the best fit sheet sizes to be specified and supplied reducing waste paper and wasted time.

"The savings compared with buying standard sizes are significant," claims Tame. "On average MySize saves 14% paper use per order compared to the nearest stock size. This equates to approximately one tonnes less of paper required per MySize order additionally reducing the environmental impact by about 1.1 tonnes of CO2."

Going to waste
Reducing waste is a great way of delivering cost and carbon savings and in the future this is where the papermaking industry will continue to focus its own efforts. While the technology of paper manufacturing is probably as good as it's ever going to get there is still room for improvement, says PEFC's Bradshaw, pinpointing "the re-use of fibre and water, energy efficiency and the use of biomass fuel" as the key areas where big differences are going to be made in the years ahead.
A number of mills have already scored successes,

investing significant sums in combined heat and power (CHP) facilities - an impressive undertaking considering the turmoil and consolidation that the industry has undergone in recent years.

Notable mentions go to papermakers like Arjowiggins. It has reduced the amount of electricity it uses to manufacture a tonne of paper by 20% in the past five years with the consumption of fossil fuels falling by 12% over the same period. At its Dalum recycled paper site, 75% of energy requirements are now met by biomass power generation, which has resulted in a 90% reduction in carbon emissions.

These are key issues that buyers need to consider because, regardless of whether or not the paper they specify matches the desired percentage criteria set down by individual organisations, it's only a small part of the overall picture.

"The source of fibre used to make paper is only one element of the environmental credentials of a particular supply or supplier," says UPM's Sanderson. "Concentrating on this ignores many other equally important aspects including how the paper itself was manufactured. Any environmentally responsible paper procurement guidance should also take account of a supplier's overall environmental responsibility and therefore acknowledge established accreditations such as ISO 14001, EMAS, Chain of Custody and environmental labels such as PEFC, FSC and the EU's own Eco-Label."

Only when paper buyers look at paper within this context will they be able to decide if the lifecycle of the grade that they are specifying meets the needs of the job and their businesses' environmental aspirations.

TWO SIDES: DISPELLING THE MYTHS
One of the key aims of the Two Sides initiative is to correct misconceptions surrounding the European paper and pulp industry. Here are five key facts about paper manufacturing - for more visit www.twosides.info
• In managed forests, for every tree cut down, three to four are replanted
• It is estimated that there are 25% more trees in the developed world today than there were in 1901, and in Europe alone, the size of forests is increasing annually by an area equivalent to more than 1.5m football pitches
• Of the wood extracted from the world’s forests, 53% is used for energy production, 28% by sawmills and only 11% directly by the paper industry
• On average it takes 500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity to produce 200kg of paper, the average amount of paper that each of us consume each year. 500kWh is equivalent to powering one computer continuously for five months or burning a 60W light bulb continuously for a year
• The paper industry is one of the biggest users of renewable, low-carbon energy with half the energy used to make paper in Europe coming from renewable sources
Source: Two Sides

FSC VERSUS PEFC
The difference between the two schemes is minimal - it’s more a case of horses for courses. Both have their critics and both have their plaudits. In the UK, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has definitely stolen a march on its rival establishing high levels of awareness among consumers.

However, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) scheme is catching up and earlier this year awarded its 1,000th Chain of Custody certificate to UK fine arts and social stationery publisher Woodmansterne.

PEFC says that it witnessed a 300% increase in demand for its certification between 2007 and 2008, while the FSC claims that it is the fastest-growing certification scheme in the world. Still confused? Perhaps the best way forward is to look for suppliers that are certified by both. This is the advice of PEFC (UK) director Ross Bradshaw.

In all of the presentations I make and if anybody ever asks me, I will always promote the idea of going for joint certification. To attain both certificates you have to go through a process and if you’re doing it for one certificate, then it makes sense to do it for the other – then you can tick all the boxes.