The whiteness of a sheet of paper hides obscure stories of environmental degradation and social dispossession. However, those stories are seldom known by consumers living far away from where the raw material --wood-- is obtained and from where pulp and paper are produced. It is therefore important to know --and tell-- the story.
The story usually begins in a forest, which is either clearcut to provide raw material to a pulp mill --and then left to regrow or replanted with a single species-- or is cleared for its substitution by a monoculture fast-growth tree plantation. In some cases, it is not forests but grasslands that are destroyed to give way to large-scale pulpwood plantations. In any of these cases, the impacts on local biodiversity, water and soils are huge.
Bulletin Issue 83 - June 2004
The impacts of pulp production
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: THE IMPACTS OF PULP PRODUCTION
The production of pulp and paper has long been associated with deforestation and environmental pollution. More recently, it has been the driving force behind the spread of fast-growth tree monocultures to feed ever increasing paper and cardboard consumption. Given that trees grow faster in tropical and subtropical countries –where land, water and labour are cheap and where environmental protection is less stringent than in the North- the industry has also begun to shift pulp production to the South. Given the destructive character of both pulpwood plantations and pulp production, we thought it useful for people involved in or affected by plantations or pulp-related pollution, to dedicate an entire WRM bulletin to this issue. The first part of the bulletin aims at clarifying the general aspects of pulp production and consumption, while the second part focuses on specific country situations.WRM Bulletin
83
June 2004
OUR VIEWPOINT
THE PULP AND PAPER SCENARIO
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29 June 2004Long time ago the need of our first ancestors to transmit words and images found their way on stone walls, clay tablets, wax-coated boards, animal hides and other media. Later, around 3000 B.C. the Egyptians began writing on papyrus reeds. Papyrus stalks were laminated into strips (as were bamboo slivers in China). Ts'ai Lun, a Chinese official, is credited with inventing the first real paper around A.D. 105 by pounding mulberry, hemp fishing nets and rags into a material that ultimately allowed the calligraphy brush to dance across a smooth surface. Rolled up scrolls remained the standard information storage unit until the codex, or folded leaf notebook, appeared around the fourth century A.D.
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29 June 2004Pulp mills process timber in order to obtain the main raw material for paper production: pulp. They are usually large factories located close to where timber is cut, that is to say, near forests or monoculture tree plantations, from where the logs can be easily transported, thus cutting costs. Basically, wood comprises lignin and cellulose fibres and the first step to obtain pulp is to crush the solid wood. Depending on the processes used, two types of pulp are to be distinguished.
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29 June 2004The dispossession, deforestation and pollution caused by the pulp and paper industry is tied to a dynamic of ever-increasing scale, concentration and capital intensiveness which has characterized the industry since the Industrial Revolution. Crucial to this dynamic are attempts by the industry and its allies to refashion the political and physical infrastructure through which they work, capturing subsidies, managing demand, centralizing power, and evading, digesting and regulating resistance. In such a context, the claim that the industry helps society meet its pre-existing needs "more efficiently" makes little sense. Some common but false assumptions about the pulp and paper industry are that:
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29 June 2004Pulp mills’ extremely large scale makes it necessary for them to simplify under a central authority not only landscapes, biological diversity and genetic diversity, but also political systems. The sheer size of the mills and the landscape they reorganize around them means that to survive, they need constantly to attract subsidies, stimulate demand – and above all, control resistance, both from ordinary people and from the landscape. Where opposition does not challenge the pulp and paper industry's most fundamental interests, it will attempt to contain it by internally redistributing its considerable resources in various ways, relieving tensions in one area through slack in another. For example, the industry will try to:
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29 June 2004Ashis Nandy, the Indian psychologist and social critic, once defined progress as "growth in the awareness of oppression". What he meant, in part, is that we are fortunate that due to the rise of feminist movements we are more aware of the way women have been exploited than formerly, that due to anti-racist struggles we are clearer about many of the ways of oppression, and that due to the long hours radical scholars put in at their libraries we understand economic exploitation better. And who could deny that paper consumption -- writing materials, books -- have played a part in all this? But does it follow that we can equate paper consumption with progress?
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29 June 2004The present scenario, where most countries have become mere markets for an increasingly reduced group of powerful corporations that share them between themselves while keeping up a network of commercial links --for which they want to have more and more elbow room--, has also been built up with language and the introduction of concepts that are imposed as truths. Thus, regarding paper and its imposition as a product of growing consumption, the language has been used to create a misleading correlation between paper consumption and literacy, implying that more paper is required (and therefore more plantations to feed more pulp mills) to supply increasingly literate populations with reading and writing material.
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29 June 2004Making clean white paper from trees is a dirty business. To make bleached kraft pulp, trees are chipped, cooked under pressure, washed and then bleached. Toxic chemicals are used in the cooking process to remove lignin, a glue-like substance that holds wood cells together and makes trees strong. As lignin causes yellowing of paper, any lignin remaining has to be bleached. Forestry scientists believe they have found a way of making paper from trees less polluting. Through genetic engineering they can produce trees with reduced levels of lignin or with lignin that can be more easily extracted.
THE LOCAL IMPACTS OF PULP MILLS
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29 June 2004A new cycle in the increasing of production of eucalyptus pulp for export began in northern Espirito Santo, the southern region of Bahia and north-eastern Minas Gerais, with the opening in 2002 of the new Aracruz Celulose mill. This company increased its annual pulp production from 1.2 to 2.0 million tons, and expects to reach 2.4 million tons. Veracel Celulose, jointly owned by Aracruz and the Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso, is currently building its first eucalyptus pulp mill, the biggest in the world, with an annual production capacity of 900 thousand tons. Bahia Sul Celulose, owned by Suzano Papel e Celulose, will triple its annual pulp production and aims to reach 1.7 million tons.
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29 June 2004Twenty-two months after the beginning of its construction and almost five years behind schedule, the Valdivia mill started operating in the Lakes Region. The announcement was made on 30th January by Alejandro Pérez, General Manager of Celco (Celulosa Arauco y Constitución, forestry subsidiary of the Angelini group), who called this project a “historical investment”. The delay was due to the resistance of citizens’ organizations, environmental activists, indigenous peoples, peasant women and especially the residents of the coastal town Mehuin, who for over three years successfully campaigned to prevent Celco from dumping its effluents into Maiquillahue bay.
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29 June 2004Uruguay has been one of the countries in the region that has best and fastest fulfilled the duties others have dictated. Already in 1951, a joint FAO-World Bank mission made a series of recommendations regarding the country’s forestry development, which was the basis for the forestry laws adopted in 1968 and 1987. Their vision implied the promotion of suitable species for the timber industry in the framework of an export model, in which forest management is just another business or manufacturing activity.
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3 June 2004Pulp and paper production in Kenya is presently dominated by one firm, Pan African Paper Mills (Panpaper), which is a joint venture between the Kenyan Government, the World Bank’s private investment arm International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Orient Paper Mills, part of the Birhla group from India. The pulp mill was established in 1974 and is based in Webuye town, with a population of some 60,000 people, on the banks of the Nzoia River which drains into Lake Victoria.
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3 June 2004‘Pulping the South’ by Larry Lohmann and Ricardo Carrere was a watershed publication for many groups and individuals around the world. Concerned people had been aware of many issues and problems associated with the expansion of industrial monoculture tree plantations in Southern countries, but it was this WRM publication that made the world sit up with a jolt. Organisations such as Timberwatch in South Africa started to pay more attention to environmental and socioeconomic issues associated with timber plantations themselves, as well as the negative impacts of industrial processing activities that had escaped the awareness of society at large until then.
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3 June 2004Since 1996, in an attempt to control pollution, China's State Environmental Protection Administration has closed thousands of pulp and paper mills. "A significant portion of urban as well as rural water pollution problems came from industry and, in particular, the pulp and paper industry," commented the World Bank in a 2000 report about China's pulp and paper industry. China has closed down 7,000 small mills according to Petteri Pihlajamaki of Finnish forestry consulting firm Jaakko Pöyry. "The Chinese pulp and paper industry caused more pollution than the pulp and paper industry of the rest of the world combined," he told Tove Selin, Coordinator of the Finnish NGO campaign to reform Export Credit Agencies.
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3 June 2004In the early 1980s the Indonesian government launched an ambitious forestry plan entitled "Industrial Timber Plantation (HTI) and Pulp Industry Development." In the early stages of its development, pulpwood plantations were claimed to rehabilitate degraded land and to reduce the pressure on natural forests. This misleading propaganda was indeed intended to disguise an ambitious plan of the Indonesian government for the country to become a world major pulp and paper producer.
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3 June 2004Established in 1989, Advance Agro Public Company Limited is located in Prachinburi province. Its main business is producing and selling pulp and printing and writing paper. The company’s production capacity of bleached kraft pulp is 175,000 tons per year. It also produces bleached short-fibre pulp for two mills operated under Advance Agro Pulp, with a combined capacity of 427,000 tons as well as printing and writing paper, with an annual capacity of 250,000 tons. Along with its subsidiaries (High Tech Paper and Advance Paper), Advance Agro has an annual production capacity of 500,000 tons. About 70% of its product is exported to China, the US, Hong Kong and Japan.
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3 June 2004Just meters beyond the outer wall of Tan Mai Paper mill, a thriving industry exists in the shade of coconut trees. In ponds where rice fields used to lie, local villagers stand chest deep in wastewater from the factory. Young men strain to lift nets out of the ponds, filled to the brim with the catch of the day: paper fiber emitted in the mill's wastewater.