Month: December 2012

Featured image of article: Successful tour by Indonesian delegates

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In November, the European Environmental Paper Network hosted three Indonesian delegates on a tour of nine European cities, explaining what is happening on the ground, particularly in Sumatra, as a result of pulp and paper industry activity. They educated a wide range of paper buyers, bankers and other investors, p0liticians, journalists and environmental activists about the forest destruction and social conflict that is being suffered. Their visit has made a big impact already and we look forward to a better-informed and more responsible approach to European trade in Indonesian paper in future.

A huge thanks to Aidil Fitri, Muslim and Hariansyah Usman for their energy and commitment in making this tour and to all our member organisations who helped to organise meetings, helped with logistics and offered hospitality to the visitors.

A report of their visit is now available here: Indonesians Tour report

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Our work on reducing paper consumption in Europe is our top priority, but this doesn’t mean we hate all paper! Some uses of paper are really beneficial, like the paper in our passports, good books and some sanitary applications. But other kinds of paper have little social value. There is a spectrum of what we call ‘paper utility’ ranging from very useful to not useful at all.

As part of our Shrink Paper project (see shrinkpaper.org) to encourage paper saving, we are keen to identify the most wasteful kinds of paper use and focus on them. To help with this we are developing a tool to encourage big paper consumers to understand the social utility of the paper they use. And you can help.

Take our Paper Utility Survey and tell us which kinds of paper you think are useful, and which not. We’ll publish the results here. We have already done some trials of this, and the results are intriguing. A sample of German paper users, for example, thought that books have higher utility than money and that paper cups are less useful than advertising leaflets. What do you think? You can tell us your views here!