Articles On Demand (CONT’D FROM PAGE 12)
Not only does recycling not get the airtime it rightly de- serves as part of this story, but FOX also makes comments about trees and paper products with no facts. If they had the facts, they would know that the sustainable manage- ment of forests is a key issue for the packaging industry. Even though most paper packaging made in Canada is high in recycled content, the paper fibres it was originally made from came from a tree. But by law, every hectare of commercial forest that is harvested in Canada must be successfully regenerated. On average, over 1,000 new tree seedlings are planted in Canada every minute. And all PPEC-member mills producing corrugated box material have independent, third-party certification that their paper fibre sources (whether wood chips and sawmill residues or recycled fibres) are responsibly sourced. When you add it up, the Canadian industry hardly uses freshly cut trees to make paper packaging, and the little that is harvested (0.2 percent in 2018) is successfully regenerated. While the media articles mentioned told the story about increased demand for corrugated cardboard boxes, they did not provide the full story of what happens to those box- es after they leave the manufacturing facility; they end up going to a customer, then a recycling bin, and eventually those recycled materials are remade into new paper pack- aging. And that continuous and sustainable loop deserves to be part of the story, with the facts to back it up, to help inform and educate the public. Rachel Kagan is the Executive Director of the PPEC.
• Ontario has a 98 percent recovery rate for corrugated cardboard • Most of the paper packaging material made by Canadi- an mills is 100 percent recycled content Not only are these materials recyclable, they are actu- ally being recycled – an important distinction illustrating that Canadians understand their role and do their part by actively recycling. This allows those recycled materials to be remade into new paper packaging, as evidenced by the high amount of recycled content used by mills. And it’s a similar story in the U.S., where 88.8 percent of cardboard and 65.7 percent of paper were recycled in 2020, according to the AF&PA, who reported that those rates remained unchanged during the pandemic, calling that “a testament to the resilience of the paper and wood products industry.” But it was FOX Business’ article that made no mention of the environment, except in a video clip that accompa- nied the story. In the 3-minute clip, FOX reporter Jeff Flock interviewed Andy Reigh of Welch Packaging, a corrugated box manufacturer located in Elkart, Indiana. Two minutes into the video, Flock makes a comment about “trees,” and then when he throws it back to the FOX newsroom, host Stuart Varney said “I thought all this stuff was recycled,” and you can barely hear Flock say that most of it is recy- cled.
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www.boardconvertingnews.com
June 7, 2021
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