CHINA’s WASTEPAPER A BLESSING AND A CURSE

[Anonymous]

China’s Demand For Recycled Wastepaper: A Blessing And A Curse For The World’s Forests
DEC
07 — China’s paper industry has built-up a massive recycling capacity
that is shielding forests worldwide from destruction by supporting a
strong international market for wastepaper as an alternative to
pulpwood, according to a new report released by Forest Trends, a
leading international forestry organization.
The
Forest Trends report, Environmental Aspects of China’s Papermaking
Fiber Supply, notes that today about 60 percent of the fiber used to
manufacture paper and paper board products in China is derived from
wastepaper–a substantial portion of which comes from the US, Europe,
and Japan. In the last ten years China’s wastepaper imports increased
by more than 500 percent–from 3.1 million metric tons in 1996 to 19.6
million metric tons in 2006–with most of that growth occurring between
2002 and 2006.But the report warns that wastepaper alone is not
sufficient to keep up with China’s production demands, as high quality
pulp and pulpwood are also being used to supply international buyers
with high quality paper. The report finds that the same explosive
growth that’s created such a strong market for wastepaper is also
boosting China’s demand for pulp and pulpwood from developing countries
already struggling to contain illegal and destructive logging. For
example, China today buys some of its pulp and pulpwood from Indonesia
and Eastern Russia where illegal, environmentally rapacious logging is
widespread. And any increase in demand could exacerbate problems in
those regions.”China is by far the world’s biggest consumer of
wastepaper and that’s a good thing because in the last four years
alone, China has prevented 65 million metric tons of wastepaper from
heading to landfills in the US, Japan, and Europe,” said Brian
Stafford, the lead author of the report and an expert on the
international pulp and paper industry. “Just last year, China’s use of
wastepaper instead of trees to make paper products probably saved 54
million metric tons of wood from being harvested for pulp.”But Stafford
said that as China’s producers scramble to meet growing domestic and
international demand for paper products especially for higher quality
papers, they continue to “source substantial amounts of wood and wood
pulp from countries where good forest management cannot be
assured.””The biggest environmental challenge related to China’s paper
industry is to prevent its growing demand for fiber from driving ever
more forest destruction in places like Indonesia and Eastern Russia,”
he said. “Wastepaper can only provide so much fiber and with huge new
pulp mills coming on line in China, there is a legitimate concern that
future growth in China’s paper industry is going to happen at the
expense of already stressed natural forests in the tropics.”

The
report comes amid growing international controversy over the influence
of China’s industry on the global market for paper and raw timber.
Environmental groups worry that China’s paper industry, along with its
similarly red-hot wood products industry, is meeting rising domestic
and international demand by ramping up imports of logs and pulp from
abroad without focusing on whether the materials come from legal and
sustainable forests.At the same time, producers in the US, claiming
that government subsidies give Chinese producers an unfair advantage in
the world paper market, recently convinced the US Department of
Commerce to place trade sanctions in the form of higher import duties
on glossy paper manufactured in China.But as environmentalists worry
about the effects on forests, and US paper producers nervously monitor
the market power of their Chinese counterparts, it’s clear that the
growth of China’s paper industry is playing a major role in ensuring
the viability of wastepaper recycling programs in the US, Europe, and
Japan.

In 2006, the US alone sold 8.6 million metric tons of
wastepaper to China–2.8 million metric tons more that its entire 1996
global trade in wastepaper. Wastepaper is now one of the top US exports
to China by volume. The report observes that today it’s not unusual for
Chinese container ships to off-load goods at US ports and then return
to China loaded up with US-collected wastepaper. According to an
article earlier this year in The New York Times, Zhang Yin, the owner
of China’s largest paper company, Nine Dragons Paper–and reportedly
China’s wealthiest woman–got her start in the business driving around
the United States collecting wastepaper from landfills and shipping it
to China.Ironically, the high quality of US wastepaper that makes it so
attractive to recycling operations in China is due to the fact that
most US paper companies manufacture their products with “virgin fiber”
derived from timber.The report notes that about three-quarters of the
fiber China gets from wastepaper is used “to manufacture corrugated
cardboard boxes to ship the great quantities of Chinese goods such as
consumer electronics, clothing, and furniture to overseas markets.” The
rest is mostly employed to make newsprint, as well as certain types of
coated paper used in magazines and advertising catalogues (though not
the coated paper that was the subject of the US trade complaint).”It’s
clear that the sheer volume of the wastepaper used in Chinese
manufacturing has a very beneficial and stabilizing effect on the
global market for wastepaper, which in turn makes wastepaper collection
a viable ‘green’ option for communities in wealthy countries,” said
Kerstin Canby, Director of Forest Finance and Trade at Forest Trends.
“But we remain concerned that Chinese paper companies can’t survive on
wastepaper alone, and when they look for other types of fiber–chiefly
fiber needed for export-quality paper–some large firms have a tendency
to go shopping for wood and pulp in countries where natural forests
already are under tremendous pressure.”For example, the report found
that of the 7.4 million metric tons of high-grade printer paper China
produced in 2005, only 64 percent “can be regarded as having been drawn
from sustainably managed wood resources.” For example, Indonesia and
Eastern Russia are among China’s suppliers of pulp and pulpwood and the
report concludes that “paper manufacturers that source from these
countries are likely to be running a high risk of including illegally
logged wood in their product.”

The report recommends that
Chinese paper companies should adopt systems, such as those that have
been established by the non-profit Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and
the Tropical Forest Trust, that would enable them to track pulp and
pulpwood all along the supply chain in order to verify it comes from
legal and sustainable forests. For example, in Western Russia, two
logging companies have worked with four of the world’s biggest
consumers of paper products–publishers Axel Spring, Time UK and Random
House in addition to packaging manufacturer Tetra Pak–to create a
transparent supply chain of wood fiber derived from legal and
sustainable forests.The report also calls on government or “public”
buyers of paper to police their supply chains for illegal wood as a way
to encourage other major importers to do the same. The report observes
that the EU and Japan already have gone this route for several wood
product categories and that China could start with a pilot procurement
program that ensures paper supplies related to the 2008 Beijing
Olympics are manufactured with raw materials derived from verifiably
legal and sustainable sources.

[Author]

December 5, 2007 at 11:50 AM