The winner of Metsä Group’s sustainability competition for suppliers is Soilfood

Those of you who read The Daily Telegraph may have spotted a familiar name in the Letters to the Editor section on Saturday. Two Sides wrote to the Editor in response to a previous article in the paper about the BBC’s decision to replace paper scripts with digital scripts as part of their ‘green measures’. Here’s an extract from the original article that we, and many of our members and stakeholders, had a particular issue with; Shows such as Casualty have already halved the paper they use from scripts as part of their green measures, estimating they have saved the equivalent of 90 trees. Two Sides works hard to tackle misconceptions about the print and paper industry. Statements claiming that saving paper saves trees are unsubstantiated, misleading and can have a lasting effect on people’s perceptions of paper. click Read More below for additional detail

Forest certification is in this context a success story. As of 2019, about one-third of the wood used in products, packaging or construction is certified as originating from sustainable forest management and supply chains. PEFC, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, has been instrumental to this success. With innovations such as group certification, a mechanism that makes certification accessible to small- and family forest owners, PEFC has expanded the accessibility of certification. Today about one million forest owners have obtained PEFC certification. With its latest sustainable forest management standard, PEFC expanded the scope of certification to include Trees outside Forests, extending the impact of PEFC certification beyond the boundaries of the forest. This innovation can make PEFC certification practical and affordable to farmers or other land managers, who are often growing trees as just one of their many crops.

Sustainable development is usually described as encompassing three main pillars: Environmental, social, and economic. But there are other important dimensions that need to be addressed. “Sustainability is about much more than just the environmental, social and economic dimensions. It is also about the dimensions of space and time, both of which need to be addressed for sustainable development to make a real difference on the ground,” said Thorsten Arndt, Head of Communications at PEFC International, at the 2nd International Convention on Sustainable Trade and Standards in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “The dimension of space means that we have to translate our global understanding of sustainable development into the local context and address the unique local framework conditions, which are different from country to country,” Mr. Arndt explained. “The dimension of time takes into account that our understanding and our expectations of sustainability change over time, so we need to adapt it on a regular basis,” he continued.