The Surprising Reasons Paper Packaging Isn’t Always Bad for the Environment
The “paperless” movement has gained a great deal of traction in the last ten years as environmentalists and environmentally-conscious citizens have tried to minimize paper use in order to prevent deforestation. Paper has largely been replaced with digital books and notepads, laptops and tablets, emails and text messages. Product packaging has often come under fire for using so much paper, but the truth is that using paper for product packaging might actually help the environment. It sounds surprising, but consider this new line of thought.
A Practical Example
It’s often easiest to understand new concepts by looking at an example. If product packaging eliminated paper as a resource, it would cause local timber companies to lose business and be forced to sell off their land. If a local dairy farmer purchased the property to convert into a pasture, the land that used to responsibly harvest trees would be transformed into a cattle and grassland devoid of any trees at all. Instead of wealth of trees available to absorb carbon dioxide and replenish the air with oxygen, the land will instead be overtaken by animals that pollute the air with methane gas. This example proves that the real issue involved in deforestation isn’t papermaking, but how to use land sustainably.
A Different Perspective
Instead of making “paper use” and “deforestation” synonymous, as a nation we need to instead recognize that forests need to be preserved and used for paper sustainably in order to maintain the land use for forests and not development or other environmentally perilous changes. So what does this mean for companies selling products that require paper packaging? Transparency! Consumers want and need to know that a product being sold contains components that were harvested sustainably with minimal impact on the Earth.
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the American Tree Farm System (ATFS), the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), and many other programs have been developed to encourage transparency and help buyers and suppliers of paper products to share supply chain information on environmental performance.
Overall, the goal is to earn customer trust by playing by the rules and tapping into sustainably managed resources that use trees responsibly. As more companies aim to utilize the FSC, SFI, ATFS, and PEFC to use paper in a positive way, packaging can remain effective and attractive while still supporting what’s best for the environment.
