Are we placing too much emphasis on recycled fibres and neglecting to look at the positive impact of the virgin pulp and paper industry? Does the responsible management of forests play a staple role in the UK’s protection of the environment, and what is the carbon footprint of recycled paper versus virgin anyway?

These were just a few of the many talking points that were up for consideration when the first Products of Change Paper Workstream kicked off last week, with the aim of bringing cross-sector conversation together around the topic of pulp and paper.

With awareness of the vast negative impact human activity is having upon the world’s biodiversity and climate growing globally, industry has begun to make in-roads in reducing its impact and carbon emissions. It’s understandable that those conversations have been brought, in recent years, to the paper industry, too.

Whether it’s sourcing raw materials or implementing new strategies across operations and value chains of the companies and brands in the business of paper, it’s undeniable this more than $350bn global industry will have a key role to play in the sustainable development of the global economy.

And, proving a subject that touches all those in the consumer products space in some shape or form, Products of Change’s first Paper Workstream meeting brought together a mix of cross-industry professionals, from toy companies Sambro and Rainbow Designs and children’s magazine publishers, Immediate Media to brand owners Boat Rocker and industry representatives the Greetings Card Association.

Duncan Shearer, client services director at Seymour Publishing and Products of Change’s ambassador for the paper and pulp workstream group, led last week’s ‘scene-setting’ gathering by encouraging conversation around numerous topics pertinent to the sector, including a bird’s eye view of the ecosystem his team has built for reducing waste material and products and introducing more circularity within its overall operations. This includes, among many other measures, a system by which rather than pulping and recycling, unsold magazines from the UK market are introduced to markets in Ireland or Europe as a ‘second chance to sell’ option – reducing waste and emissions created in the recycling process.

“For a magazine alone, 85% of the carbon footprint comes from the manufacturing of the paper and the printing of the product,” Duncan told attendees, highlighting just how big a role a circular system of reusing unsold product can play in reducing emissions and impact.

The circular economy, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is an as-yet untapped economy of over $12trn that requires a systems-level rethinking of the take, make, and throwaway linearity that business has grown comfortable with. By collecting and reusing materials and products already in circulation – and maintaining them at their highest value state – business can make both vast savings in material cost and vast reduction in emissions.

Fundamental to the circular economy is designing out waste. It takes the emphasis off recycling and places it on reuse. And while designing products for recyclability fits our current systems thinking, it is an area that the pulp and paper sector has been grappling with for some time.

“Contrary to what we might expect, and if we’re just looking at it in terms of fossil carbon footprint, then the fossil carbon footprint of recycled grade paper tends to be higher than the fossil carbon footprint of virgin grade paper,” Michael Sturges, senior sustainability and environmental consultant at RISE, representing PPA, the Professional Publishers Association, told meeting attendees.

“And this goes back to virgin grades having access to bio-based fuels [from wood and bark cast-offs and black liquor by products of the pulping process] as natural side-streams of the production process. Whereas, recovered paper grade don’t have those bio-based fuels. So, you tend to use less energy but you are having to use fossil fuel energy.

“Therefore, the carbon footprint of recycled paper tends to be higher than virgin.”

What the impact of any eventual transition to green or clean energy is yet to be determined but it’s reasonable to expect that narrative to be switched once renewable energy enters national or global use.

“From a resource efficiency perspective, we’re all aware of the need for a circular economy,” continued Michael. “So, it makes sense to get as many reuses out of those [paper and pulp] fibres as we can. Even though, if we incinerated the virgin paper with energy recovery and made fresh virgin paper, we might have a lower fossil carbon footprint.

“But that’s not efficient from a resource point of view, and it’s not achievable from the point of view of the forests because we’d need extra forests and extra virgin fibres. So, it really is about looking at the whole system rather than looking at one versus the other, i.e. recycled paper versus virgin paper.”

It’s this kind of perspective on the whole pulp and paper picture that was seconded by Amanda Fergusson, director of the Greetings Card Association when she broached the subject of FSC paper and the responsible management of forests for the paper sector.

“We have to look at responsibly managed forests as a good thing for the environment,” she suggested. “What would take the place of those forests if industry didn’t have a need for them? How would that land be used, because unfortunately, return on investment dictates that that land would be used for something else other than forests were industry not dependent upon them.”

So, it was serious food for thought that the first Paper Workstream meeting left attendees with last week, yet an eagerness for this cross-industry faction – a Pulp Faction – to take conversation to the next level and begin to forge a pathway to the sustainable development of business within the world of paper.

Products of Change Members can now watch the meeting via the On Demand page on the POC platform.