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Environmental efforts made by the Japanese paper industry

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Measures against illegal logging taken by the Japanese paper industry

  • The Japanese paper industry follows the Japan Forestry Agency Guideline of the “individual companies’ own systems” to combat illegal logging. Individual companies put different measures into place, but a preparation of a raw material procurement policy and a legality verification system is done by all.
  • The Japan Paper Association (JPA) at its board meeting held on March 20, 2006, deliberated, decided and publicly announced the Code of Conduct of the Japan Paper Association for Issues on Illegal Logging'. This Code of Conduct was established based on the common understanding of the member companies that sharing an industry-level vision is extremely important in the preparation of their respective wood procurement policies and legality verification systems because they have opted for “the individual companies’ own systems.”
  • The Japan Forestry Agency Guideline adds that “Assessment by a third party institution is desirable for securing objectivity” when the individual companies’ own systems are opted. In addition, many member companies requested JPA to conduct the auditing/assessment service. Under these circumstances, JPA decided to strengthen the industry efforts to combat illegal logging by starting assessment and auditing service in its name. For this purpose, the JPA board, at its meeting held on March 20, 2007, resolved to update the Committed Action Plan on Environment to include JPA initiatives against illegal logging including the assessment and auditing service to be started. Beginning in FY2007, the Monitoring Service against Illegal Logging has been extended accordingly.
  • Member companies and their affiliated companies make public disclosure of their status of efforts against illegal logging on websites, etc. At this point in time, the member companies and their affiliated companies that have formulated a raw material procurement policy and a legality verification system and have disclosed them publicly are as shown in the appendix.
  • The overview of the status of JPA efforts against illegal logging including the results of the Monitoring Service against Illegal Logging is as follow. For more information about
    measures against illegal logging
Column Global Forest Resources and Illegal Logging

Fundamental principle of the raw material procurement in the Japanese paper industry is coexistence with the forests. The Japanese paper industry uses resources from properly managed forests, with a firm grasp of the current status of forests in each country. Therefore, the industry’s imports of raw material woodchip are mainly from developed countries where sustainable forest management is taking place.

Also, woodchip imports from developing countries, especially tropical countries where the issue of deforestation are being called out internationally are mostly from properly managed artificial forests. In addition, tropical wood species are not used as raw material because they are unsuitable as raw material for papermaking that requires a large amount of uniform quality raw materials.

In summary, it is thought that main cause of deforestation in tropical regions is not the paper industry, but harvesting for fuelwood and conversion of forests to agricultural land and grazing land for increasing food production due to population growth. On the other hand, forest area is increasing in developed countries which are major suppliers of woodchip.

This shows that efforts to maintain and increase forest resources like forest plantations are made in such countries.

 
World’s forest area
Wood production by region and application