Urban Ecoist

So, Greenpeace is campaigning against the Kimberly-Clark Company. Supposedly, Kimberly-Clark is using virgin cut trees from the Canadian Aboreal Forest. K-C makes disposable products like Kleenex, Huggies, Scott and Viva paper towels, Kotex, Depend[s], and my favorite toilet tissue, Cottonelle.

Since I usually trust Greenpeace to get their facts straight before they go public with a boycott, I participated in the campaign last year. Now, Greenpeace is releasing video of wood stockpiles that are headed for the Terrace Bay Pulp mill in Ontario, right at the tippy-top of Lake Superior. The wood stockpiles contain logs from the Ogoki Forest, which is one of the last stands of virgin boreal forest left in Canada.

First, let’s look at the problem of logging in the boreal forest. It is a unique ecosystem that has developed over a very long time, in such that this type of forest cannot repair itself without losing its unique composition of conifers and other softwoods. You see, when the boreal forest is cut down and replanted, the trees that start to grow are not the same trees that grew there before. Or in order to prevent deciduous hardwoods from taking over, chemical herbicides would have to be used, thus degrading the forest environment. The planted trees will just not take to the new regular pattern of distribution and cannot compete naturally with hardwoods (maybe something to do with a warmer world since the boreal forest established itself). But also, it is the nature of the boreal forest to reseed itself in fires, as with the jack pine. Furthermore, the boreal forest depends heavily on decomposition of trees and other plantlife. If you take out too many trees, the soils will suffer.

Not to mention, all the logging trucks and logging roads, the erosion, the possibility of accidents or spills with gasoline and oil, the loss of habitat for the woodland caribou…

So…Terrace Bay Pulp, Inc. sells nearly half of their pulp (from this virgin cut old-growth) to Kimberly-Clark. This is from Business Net.

Now that the mill is again producing, Terrace Bay Pulp will ship at least half the output to key customer Kimberly-Clark, which had a long-term fiber agreement after spinning off Neenah Paper into a standalone company. The rest of the output will be marketed mostly in North America and perhaps see some tonnage exported to Europe, contacts said.

As a city-dweller, an Urban Ecoist if you will, it is important to recognize that every product that you use is sourced somewhere and in some fashion. It is our collective responsibility to see that the products we do purchase and use are not from a critical ecosystem or harvested in a harmful manner. Do you necessarily need Greenpeace to find these things out for you? No, but it is nice that someone is looking out for the collective good.

Secondly, the problem with Kimberly-Clark is a little problem I like to call greenwashing. I checked out the K-C website and looked into their sustainability reports. Oh, yeah, they talk about how they are getting wood from responsibly-cut forests, and claim that 97% of their fibre is coming from certified forests. The certification they recognize come from one of five organizations that do this certification stuff. If you want to read the whole document that I am getting this from, click here.

Now, here is the kicker. The document states that K-C give preference to fibre coming from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), but if you look at the clever little pie chart only 6.1% of the fibre K-C is using is FSC-certified. What gives, K-C? Six percent shows a preference?

FSC is considered by many to be the superior of the certifiers when it comes to sustainable harvests in our world’s forests. You can read more about the difference between FSC and the American Forest & Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which is the second-ran in terms of certifications.

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