A Conversation About Sustainable Forestry

Pulp and paper products make modern life possible. From the obvious items like writing paper to not-so-obvious products like baby diapers, you can find forest-based fiber in so many everyday things. While we can probably find paper products at every turn in our daily routines, we don’t always have the same amount of insight into where they come from or why things like sustainable forestry and recycling make a real-life impact.

To help give you the inside scoop, we recently spoke with Paige Goff, VP of Sustainability and Business Communications at Domtar, a leading provider of a variety of pulp and paper-based products committed to sourcing and manufacturing responsibly in North America. After chatting about these issues, we’re confident you’ll understand why sustainable forestry is an important issue that should matter to all of us.

Recyclebank: Let’s start with the basics. What does “sustainable forestry” mean to Domtar?

Goff: Great question. Since there’s so much buzz about sustainability in general, it’s easy to understand how sustainable forestry can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. At the highest level, sustainable forestry refers to the work we’re all doing to protect trees, forests and local economies.

The paper industry obviously relies on forests as the source of our fiber procurement, and at Domtar we know that responsibly managed forests can be renewable resources. This makes sustainability central to our overall business strategy. In addition to providing us with specific guidelines for fiber procurement, it also helps us protect forests for future generations.

To answer the question more specifically, we can also drill down to the five fundamental principles of sustainable forestry that we focus on at Domtar: we’re committed to local communities, we partner with landowners to empower them to keep forests as forests, we work with third-party certification programs to help safeguard endangered forests and wildlife, we respect the cultures and rights of indigenous peoples, and, finally, we promote the conservation of natural forests and biodiversity. 

To read more, click here.

Originally published on Recyclebank. 

Domtar Corporation (NYSE: UFS) (TSX: UFS) designs, manufactures, markets and distributes a wide variety of fiber-based products, including communication papers, specialty and packaging papers, and absorbent hygiene products. The foundation of our business is a network of world-class wood fiber-converting assets that produce papergrade, fluff and specialty pulp. The majority of our pulp production is consumed internally to manufacture paper and consumer products. Domtar is the largest integrated marketer and manufacturer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America with recognized brands such as Cougar®, Lynx® Opaque Ultra, Husky® Opaque Offset, First Choice®, EarthChoice® and Xerox® Paper and Specialty Media. Domtar is also a marketer and producer of a broad line of absorbent hygiene products marketed primarily under the Attends®, IncoPack® and Indasec® brand names. In 2014, Domtar had sales of $5.6 billion from some 50 countries. The Company employs approximately 9,800 people. To receive bite-size updates on Domtar’s sustainability efforts, along with practical eco-tips you can actually use, subscribe to the EarthChoice Monthly Minute newsletter.