A recent report by Forest Trends, called Environmental Aspects of China’s Papermaking Fiber Supply, states that in China, roughly 60 percent of the fiber used to make paper and paperboard comes from recovered fiber. The report finds that over the past 10 years China’s recovered fiber imports increased by more than 500 percent – from 3.1 million metric tons in 1996 to 19.6 million metric tons last year.
However, the report notes, even the sharp increase in recovered fiber imports is not enough to keep pace with China’s paper production demands. At the same time high quality pulp and pulpwood are driving growing demands for this material as well.
"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.
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 report finds that recovered fiber exports from the United States to China stood at 8.6 million tons last year, and is now one of the top exported commodities from the U.S. to China by volume.
"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."
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.